Ilona's Garden » bulbs

On a Cold Winter’s Night: Indoor Bulbs

the gardener — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:04:51 +0000

It is so hard for a gardener to lock up the growing season for winter, even when the platoons of garden catalogs begin marching in from the mailbox. Although houseplants offer a bit of green, the indoor flower displays from forced bulbs create the effect of springtime on the window sill.

My first introduction to these flowering delights began when my aunt, with whom I was staying, brought a bowl filled with smooth white stones and dotted with narcissus bulbs to me for my bedroom window. She had a way of living that celebrated in daily ways, and that made her a very charming person. With a little regular water, her gift of bulbs shot up and flowered into delicate, scented paperwhites. I had not yet begun to garden, but I was forever in the grasp of the demure sight of winter blooming bulbs from that point on.

In later years I would experience the growing of bold burst of amaryllis, quaint scenes of combined spring bulb gardens-in-a pot, and the dark winter nights would never be the same. A winter bulb garden, indoors, can give a completely warm and hopeful view on long winter months with its short days and little sunshine. Besides – like fruits of summer on a Valentine dessert, there is something special and exotic about the forced blooms that deck the interior rooms while the bluster of winter blows just outside the curtained pane.

Some of the best plants to force for winter bloom:

Amaryllis

Hippeastrum

A few easy to order kits from Amazon:

How To Grow: If you order a kit, nothing could be simpler. Just follow the directions on setting the bulb within the moistened growing medium in the pot. set in a sunny spot and let it grow. If you are potting up your own, use a premixed potting compost (soiless mix). Let the bulb sit for a day on a water-filled jar where just the bottom of the bulb barely touches the water. Plant with the top part of the bulb above the soil line. White Flower Farm has thorough instructions. They like a warm sunny location, 65-75° F.

You can also plant in water and pebbles, as with the Paperwhites.

If you wish to replant the following year, leave the foliage and remove the flower stem, be sure to pot in nutritious potting soil, set in a sunny window and keep it watered when dry (allow top of soil to dry out briefly). Come spring, you can pop it into the garden to grow and gain strength for the coming year. an out of the way place in the vegetable garden is perfect. At the time you lift dahlias in the fall, lift the Amaryllis, cut off foliage, and set in a dark place for 8-10 weeks; after which you repeat the forcing process.

It could be better to simply buy new bulbs each year.

Paperwhites

Narcissus tazetta

Here is the very simplest way to pot up your paperwhite bulbs. Again, White Flower Farm provides the most detailed directions for your paperwhite pots.

choose a watertight container or pot with saucer
put layer of pebbles or river rocks 2 to 4 inches deep
place the bulbs in with some stone, but leaving upper part of bulb exposed
pour water to the level of the root at base of bulbs
place somewhere cool and after rooted well, in a sunny spot
enjoy

When grown this way you can’t expect a repeat show, so toss away your spent bulbs; just think of them as a very long lasting floral arrangement. They do not survive our cold climate winters here in Ohio, either. I have tried the variety ‘Ziva’ and was very pleased with them. Try giving them a nip of alcohol to keep them from flopping over.

Dutch Bulb Gardens

Tulips, daffodils, crocus, hyacinths

The easiest alternative is to buy bulbs already prepared for you, since Dutch bulbs usually require a time of cold storage before they will bloom.

Certain varieties, especially of tulips, will be better to force for indoor bloom than others. Old list often included the single early types for forcing. the University of Missouri has an excellent page on recommended varieties and procedures for creating your own indoor Dutch Garden. some varieties may be hard to find, nowadays.

Forcing Indoor Bulbs
Tulips: Bellona -pure yellow, Couleur Cardinal -dark red, Gudoshnik- orange streaked yellow, Kansas -white.

Hyacinths: Anne Marie -pink, L’Innocence -white, Delft Blue.

Crocus: Use any of the “Dutch” varieties, rather than the snow crocus.

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Small Spring Bulbs, Crocus

the gardener — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 22:10:16 +0000

Crocus are among the first flowers I planted when I began planting a garden space at age twenty. I had long loved the early spring crocus in my mother’s garden, lining the walk leading to the entry door, and the front of her perennial border surrounding the backyard. They were among the small bulbs more ambitiously planted when I made a little rock garden in the front yard of the first home we owned. Specie tulips and miniature daffodils along with diminutive plantings of creeping campanula (poscharskyana), moss phlox, johnny jump-ups, small dianthus, all found a home in that garden.It was a small viewing garden, inside the restricted space of a city plot.

Crocus Sieberi Firefly

Because of their very early appearance in spring, they are eagerly looked for each year. The ease with which the Dutch imported corms may be grown makes them favorites for gardeners of all levels of experience.

The time to purchase these bulbs is early fall, and it is best to get them into the ground as quickly as is practical, but they will survive and grow if you delay. Theoretically you can plant until the frosts harden the ground.

A page for general instructions on planting your bulbs, and descriptions of the minor bulbs is one of the earliest of my garden pages, find out about Small Bulbs.

Click here to learn more of what Small Bulbs covers

General information on buying bulbs: what to look for. How to plant them, and bulb gardening tips. Ideas for planting combinations. Take me to the Small Bulbs Page

Through the years I found that stands of bulbs will grow very well in loamy clay, and they grow fine in clay, but once rodents find out about them, the stands of crocus bulbs will diminish as mice and squirrels voraciously feast on them over the winter. If there is deep snow cover even more of the bulbs will be gone.

I came across an extremely well done book that covers everything most gardeners would like to know about planting crocus, and it included some very helpful tips. It holds a great deal of information for those who might wish to specialize in growing crocus and collect many types. It is surprising how many species of crocus there are, and what a wide range of habitats they have come to adapt to.

Tips
One of these is the idea that no matter how few crocus bulbs you have, even if only two, divide them into two stands in different locations to try to outwit the animals who might locate and eat your bulbs. We usually plant many more corms (the proper term for the storage portion of the crocus) than two since they are sold in bags of fifteen or more in most places, but the hint to make more than one area of spring crocus is certainly well taken, I believe.

Plant spring crocus in more than a single area of the garden

The Crocus book that is so helpful, and to which I will occasionally refer, because it is so expert and detailed about specific types of crocus is called ‘Crocuses: A Complete Guide to the Genus‘. Although the common types of crocus are easy, this information can make a big difference in the longevity, bloom, and health of your crocus planting.

Crocuses: A Complete Guide to the Genus

The Dutch Crocus

These are the garden cultivated crocus we so often associate with the name of this plant. They have the same shape and form, but much larger and showier blooms than the species, which are often lumped together and called “snow crocus” when sold.

The garden crocuses are varied in color from white, to blue-purple, purple, golden yellow, and a striped form, and although I admit that I’ve always had a special place in my heart for the species type, this is the one you want to plant if wishing to make a visual impact from a distance. They bloom more closely in time with the early daffodils, but don’t be fooled by a seller’s picture group of tulips, daffodils, and crocus all blooming at once, the crocus are usually long over before the other, larger spring bloomers begin.

That is part of their charm, so plant them where you will be sure to notice on cold days. Like my old fashioned sidewalk trimming, or in view of a window while looking outdoors from your cozy chair, indoors.

Species Crocus

It is with these that the collector in me had so much fun. Yes, the mice have eaten their way through most of them and I will have to replenish my stock, but there are many that have braved the last twenty plus years and still put on a good show. That is money well spent, and many years worth of joyous spring reunions. In my garden it is the C. chrysanthus and the C.tommasinianus that bloom floriferously each year. The delicate “Blue Pearl” was one of my favorites, but I don’t think I have it anymore, although there are a few survivors of some of my named varieties.

Some of the other named types I liked very well are the C. chrysanthus “Ladykiller” which are white with a purple streak up the center of each petal, C. olivieri balansae “Zwanenburg” which is dark golden with a comb-striped dark brownish purple up the center of the petal; C. chrysanthus ‘Gypsy Girl’ looks just the same to me, maybe a lighter gold. One crocus called “Tricolor” was beautiful, but I’m not sure if you can even find it anymore, and pure white “nivea” is the white that I think I have. If I purchased assortments ( as I did, at times) it is anybody’s guess what the true name is. Many of the snow crocus were purchased as named varieties, since that is the only way to be sure of getting a large number of that type. “Ladykiller” and “Zwanenburg” are still widely sold. There was a “Cream Beauty” which was really lovely, too, a very subtle color- bu it if you find it. A note on the name “Zwanenburg…. there is a different specie etruscus which has that name but is a lovely blue, it would be a shame to get the two mixed up. both are pretty, but your expectations might take an adjustment, not to mention any color harmonies you might have planned.

Planting Tips for Crocus

Crocus like good drainage and although they will perform OK in clay soil, when you give them some sand and a bit of fertilizer like bone meal or bulb tone, they will really show-off at bloomtime.

Although I hadn’t put it together as an observation myself, the book by Janis Ruksans mentioned something that was true in my experience as well (once I thought about it):

If you plant the corms deeper they grow bigger and divide more slowly; if you plant a little shallower they divide into smaller sized, but far more numerous baby corms.

Another tidbit I had never read before was the classification of crocus bulbs into types according to their preferred conditions:
Group A which needs hot, dry summers.

Group B tolerating some moisture, but needs a dry resting period.

Group C tolerates summer moisture (these are the most common types for our gardens)
…and two subgroups which must not dry out.
~ specifics found in Ruksan’s “Crocuses, A Complete Guide to the Genus”

All of the types of Crocus that I have found available for my garden fall within the C group, and the others would likely not survive without special care of some sort.

Because the book is so thorough in covering the many species of crocus it revealed the native areas of crocus origination and the conditions in which they grow. The usual way that books describe cultivation is so general that the fact that there are groupings for the crocus species simply doesn’t come up. I think the insights that come from this help gardeners like most of us to grow our plants with better results… or at least know why something might disappear from our plantings.

One of the places that my crocus did thrive exceptionally well was within the bulb boxes that I made in the early garden years, the first year here, in fact. Two wooden boxes of a long rectangular shape, with hardware wire nailed across the bottom to thwart the rodents. It was filled with purchased loam that was loose and dark, enriched with bone meal and then planted with a collection of bulbs, lily tulips in the first layer and snow crocus, iris reticulata, scillas, and a few others layered on top. Crocus and scillas have been happiest, while I decided to move the tulips elsewhere.

Wayside Gardens sells some select types, and you can sign up for their catalog:
Sign up for Wayside Gardens' award-winning catalog

You can find Campanula poscharskyana at Oakland Nursery in Columbus, Ohio.