Making Spring Come Early With Blooms From Indoor Bulbs

Make A Spring Garden Inside

If you start in the fall, you can have lovely spring flowers by the middle of winter. It's easy and fun to grow bulbs indoors, and takes up very little space. You need to simulate a short winter for the bulbs to bloom. Make bulbs think it's winter by placing them in a refrigerator, a cool closet, or even in a foam cooler place on a patio or balcony. By doing this, they will grow sturdy roots and start to sprout in preparation for spring.

Start With Good Soil

Any commercial organic potting mix is fine for bulbs, or you can make your own. It's a simple process.  Use 1 part sterilized potting soil, one part perlite, and 2 parts peat moss. Now, mix these things well together. This mixture makes a nutrient filled potting soil that is clean, porous, and moisture retaining,.

Soil from your outside garden may contain bacterial or fungal pathogens that could infect the plant roots since it's not sterilized, so it's better not to use it.

Pots For Planting

When the soil is ready to use, choose the pot you want to use and place a few pieces of broken crockery over the drainage holes. This will prevent the soil from falling out of the hole during planting, and keep the hole from clogging up later.

Next, fill the pot half-full of soil mix. Place the bulbs in the container with pointed ends up. Place the bulbs as close together as possible, but don't let them actually touch. The pot should then be filled with soil mix. Water the bulbs thoroughly from the top or immerse them in a tub of water. That settles the soil around the bulbs.

Time Out In The Dark

Crocus, daffodils and snowdrops or any other early blooming bulbs work well.  Good quality bulbs for this use are available at many places.  For instance, you can click here for Daffodils from Breck's and many other lovely flowering bulbs. It takes about 12 weeks to force these early bloomers. It takes more time for bulbs like tulips, generally about 16 weeks. Keeping bulbs in cold storage for longer times will produce taller flowers.

Too short a time in storage will result in smaller plants and sometimes flowers that start to grown then die.

Give The Bulbs Light.

Check the pots now and then once it's close time for the bulbs to start blooming. It's time to move the pots out of cold storage once there are shoots 2 to 3 inches above the soil and fine white roots emerging from the drainage holes.

Once the bulbs are at this point, they should be placed in indirect lighting for a while before moving them to direct sunlight. The soil should not be allowed to dry out.

It works better if you can first move the pots to a fairly cool location if possible, such as an unheated entryway or closed off back bedroom, where the temperatures are in the ’50s. Then place them in the heated areas of the house, and in more direct sunlight.

Economize - Reuse Those Bulbs.

Cut the flower stems off after the blooms die if you wish to reuse the bulbs. Give the foliage plenty of sunlight to allow continued growth. This gathers nutrients for the bulb to bloom next year.

After the foliage withers, don’t pull the leaves off. Leaving the leaves in place, store the bulbs in the pots in a cool, dry place until they can be planted outside. The bulb is weakened from being forced to bloom inside. Trying to force it to bloom a second time inside doesn't work well. Any bloom from forcing bulbs a second time would be small.

After bulbs are planted outside, in a year or two they will sync in with the natural seasonal schedule. Then they will start making a gorgeous display of blooms at the appropriate time.