Bring Spring Inside This Year

So you’ve read through all the seed catalogs, sharpened and oiled all your gardening tools, and are looking longingly at the garden wishing there was something growing. Whatever you do, don’t go into the garden and start digging or tilling. The soil will become compacted and you can actually ruin it for the upcoming year’s crops.

Instead, here’s what I do. Get a large vase, at least 10” tall and fill it with cool water. Then go out to your forsythia patch and cut a few stalks about 2’ long. You’ll get the best blooms if you take the younger stalks, nothing over ½” in diameter. Then arrange them in pleasing array, fastening the bundle with some twine or florist’s wire, and place into the vase. In about two weeks, depending on the warmth of the room they’re in, you’ll have beautiful yellow blossoms, just in time for the spring holidays. To further decorate the stalks, you can hang colored Easter eggs with ribbon and make it into an Easter egg tree. You can start a wonderful family tradition that your kids will look forward to every spring.

You can also do this with flowering quince and almond, when the decorations call for colors more in the rose, lavender and purple range. You could probably also get good results with any flowering woody shrubs in your yard. As a side benefit, it also gives you a chance to do a little selective pruning which is always a good thing.

Another great project is to force some flowering bulbs to bloom. Here's how:  take a cut glass candy dish (good yard sale score), around 9” diameter by around 3” high. You don’t ever want to use a candy dish that is for food as the bulbs may have been treated with toxic chemicals.

Into the candy dish, Put about an inch and a half of washed pea stone gravel. You can use any stones, I just like the rounded shape and the small size of the pea stones and think that it accentuates the shapes of the bulbs. Then open a package of bulbs. Easiest to force is hyacinth and while they look great in any of their single colors, I like to mix it up with a variety of colors. The dish will hold about five bulbs, place one in the center and then the other four encircling it. Be sure to put the bulbs with the pointy side up. Then push them down into the stones so that they are well supported and not wiggly, and put about an inch of water in the bottom of the dish, just so that the bottoms of the bulbs are sitting in the water.

Take the completed candy dish and place it in your cold basement or the coldest section of your refrigerator (not the freezer) for about 2 ½ weeks. If the water level goes down add some more water, you don’t want the bulbs to dry out. After the time is up, take the dish out of the fridge and place in a sunny spot and watch the hyacinths as they sprout and become flowers. This can take from days to weeks, depending on the room temperature, and it’s great for the kids to watch and keep up with the daily progress.

I like hyacinths because of their beautiful color and exquisite smell that reminds me of spring. It always seems that the blooms come out overnight, and the next morning when you step into the room their heavenly scent welcomes you with the first glimpse of gardens to come.

The hyacinths will stay in bloom for about a week and the bulbs should be discarded. I’ve tried planting them in the garden, but they never seem to take. In fact, the best use is to put them out by the bird feeder to keep the squirrels busy instead of hanging on the sunflower seeds.