Make A Spring Garden Inside

By starting in the fall, you can have lovely spring flowers indoors in the middle of winter. It can be a lot of fun to grow bulbs indoors and make them bloom, and takes up very little room. Creating a fake short winter is the trick. Potted bulbs placed in the refrigerator, in a cool closet, or in a foam cooler on a patio or balcony, will think that it’s winter. This causes them to grow sturdy roots and start to sprout in preparation for spring.

Start With Good Soil

You can make your own potting soil, or use any commercial organic potting mix. You can do it easily.Use 2 parts peat moss, one part perlite, and one part sterilized potting soil. Get all these things mixed together well. These ingredients will make a nutrient filled potting soil that is clean, porous, and moisture retaining,.

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.

Next, A Pot For Planting

Choose the pot you want to use after the soil is ready, and place a few pieces of broken crockery over the drainage holes. This keeps the hole from clogging up with compacted dirt, and also keeps the dirt from falling out during the planting process.

Start by filling the pot half-full of soil mix. Place the bulbs in the container with pointed ends up. Plant the bulbs as closely together as possible, without actually letting the bulbs 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.

Now You Wait

Crocus, daffodils and snowdrops work well, or any other early blooming bulbs.  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. It will take longer for bulbs like tulips, generally about 16 weeks. The flowers will be taller if they are left in cold storage longer.

If the bulbs are in storage for a shorter period of time, that results in smaller plants and sometimes flowers that start to grown then die.

Light Up Their Life.

After enough time has passed and it’s close time for the bulbs to bloom, start chiecking the pots every day or two. Fine white roots coming out of the drainage holes, and/or shoots 2 or three inches above the soil, are signs to take the pots out of cold storage.

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

It also works better to 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.

New Life For Used Bulbs.

After the blooms die, if you want to reuse the bulbs,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. Leave them be and store the bulbs in the pots in a cool, dry place until they can be planted outside. Bulbs that are forced to bloom inside are weakened, so don’t try to do it a second year in a row. 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.

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Filed under: backyard garden • backyard gardening • gardening tips • indoor herb garden • new brunswick • vegetable garden

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