Blooms Indoors - Force Bulbs

Forcing Blooms Indoors

Flowers are a great way to brighten a day. To have some lovely winter blooms at your house, start in the fall to grow spring flowering bulbs indoors. It's fun and easy to grow bulbs indoors. It also takes up very little space. The idea is to simulate a short winter. By placing potted bulbs in the refrigerator, in a cool closet, or in a foam cooler on a patio or balcony, they will think that it’s winter. This process will make the bulbs start to sprout in preparation for spring and grow sturdy roots.

Start With The Right Potting Soil

Use any good commercial organic potting soil mix, or you can make your own soil to plant the bulbs in. It's easy enough to do.Use one part perlite, 2 parts peat moss and one part sterilized potting soil. Get all these things mixed together well. That gives you a clean, porous, moisture retaining, nutrient filled potting soil.

It’s better not to use unsterilized soil from your outside garden because it may contain bacterial or fungal pathogens that could infect the plant roots.

Time For A Pot

Once you have your soil prepared, choose the pot you want to use and place a few pieces of broken crockery over the drainage holes. Place it so the soil can't fall out during the planting process, but with enough free space to allow water to still drain out the hole.

Now fill the pot half-full of soil mix. Keep the pointed ends up when placing the bulbs in the container. Plant the bulbs as closely together as possible, without actually letting the bulbs touch. Add enough soil mix to fill the pot, and water the bulbs thoroughly from the top or immerse in a tub of water - this will settle the soil around the bulbs.

It Takes Some Time Now

Try early blooming bulbs such as crocus, daffodils and snowdrops. Those all work well.  You can find these bulbs at many places.  Just as an example,click here for Daffodils from Breck's, plus many other gorgeous flowering bulbs. It takes about 12 weeks to force these early bloomers. Tulips and bulbs like them need longer, about 16 weeks. Keeping bulbs in cold storage for longer times will produce taller flowers.

Not enough time in storage will result in smaller plants and sometimes flowers that start to grown then die.

Let There Be Light.

When it's close time for the bulbs to start blooming, begin checking the pots occasionally. Take the pots out of cold storage once there are shoots a couple of inches above the soil.

At this stage of development all bulbs should be placed in indirect lighting for a while before moving them to direct sunlight. Do not be allow the soil to dry out.

It's good if you can first move bulbs to a fairly cool location if possible, such as an unheated entryway or closed off back bedroom, where the temperatures are in the ’50s, before moving them on to the heated areas of the house, and into more direct sunlight.

Blooming Once, Blooming Once Again.

To reuse the bulbs, after blooms die, cut the flower stems off. Let the foliage have plenty of sunlight for continued growth. This will gather the nutrients the bulb needs to bloom next year.

Once the foliage has withered, 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. Trying to make the bulbs bloom inside a second time doesn't work well because the bulbs are weakened from being forced to bloom inside. Any bloom from a second go round would be small.

Once the bulbs are planted back outside in the garden, they should return to their natural seasonal schedule. After a year or two to adapt, they will start producing lovely flowers at the appropriate times.