How to Force More Bulbs in the Same Space Installment #2

   It's finally gotten cool enough that I can move over to my normal chilling method for the rest of the year. By now the bulbs that were pre-chilled are getting ready for their rooting period prior to bringing them out for blooming. Here's the dilemma:

1.    I have limited space to chill my bulbs.
2.    I have to use that space for both chilling and rooting.
3.    I want to sequence my bulbs so that I have flowers blooming all winter, not just one big bang.
4.    The pots take up substantial amounts of room.

   The solution I expect to work is to have different containers for different purposes. First will be the bulk bulb chilling container. It is expected to keep the bulbs dry enough that they don't root. The other container(s) will be for rooting. They will all be stacked to fit within my chilling chamber.

storage container

    The next two pictures show my rooting container. It is made with a garden fabric bottom so I can drop the rooted bulbs through into the desired pot for blooming in my window. The containers are only as high as needed for rooting, to save space. The fabric is that weed block fabric that roots can't penetrate. The second picture shows the fabric is overlapped and pinned on the bottom.  (Don't tell my wife I used her sewing pins!!!)  This provides the strength needed to hold the wet soil and bulbs, but allows it to be un-pinned so we can drop the rooted bulbs through later.

  Here the containers are all stacked before I put them  back in my chilling chamber. Notice there is a drip tray between the storage container and the rooting containers so any drip doesn't start the storage bulbs rooting early. The first rooting containers were filled and watered 2-3 weeks before I wanted to take them out.

  After their rooting period, put some soil in the final pot, un-pin the rooting container, unfold the fabric, and it will look like this.

  

   Remove the fabric and the ring containing the bulbs, and you have your chilled, rooted bulbs in the pot of your choice, ready to grow and bloom inside the house.

How to start the forced bulb season early? Pre-chilling!

This blog post should be a short one.  Referring to my last blog on forcing bulbs, I'll explain how I'm going to keep my pots chilled.  If this is successful, then one might get up to 5 or more pots, one after the other, per year.  That's 2-4 months of blooms, depending upon conditions and what flowers you plant.  For us, most years this would extend into spring, when things are starting to come back to life anyway outside.  For me, the questions come down to what does it take to provide the chilling, how much hassle is it, and what does it provide me. Time will tell about the provision. For what it takes, not wanting to use the fridge, I'll use a cooler and re-freezable ice. My cooler will be The Bulb Box, which is much more insulated than standard coolers.

I think I'll define another acronym here as it will no doubt show up periodically.  It's EE and stands for Electrical Engineer.  As an EE by profession, I have thermo-couples and meters to test the chamber temperatures.  From it I found an interesting thing about the "re-freezable ice" containers.  Bigger isn't always better!  Based on size, I would have thought that the larger "blue" ice would have worked better than an equivalent amount of smaller ones.  My reasoning was that the little ones spent more of their size in plastic instead of re-freezable material.  What it turned out was that on the big ones, the plastic was enough of an insulator and they had enough insulating air bubbles that they could remain partially frozen yet lose a lot of their chilling capacity. I went back to the store and shook (fairly hard) a bunch of the biggers. After a little shaking you could hear and feel the air bubble in some of them. So, they're not all filled full!

Back to bulbs. Here is my 2 pot set up.

First layer

Second layer

Blue Ice final layer, then cover with base from The Bulb Box

Starting in mid August, I was swapping the blocks twice a day. As of early September, I've been doing it only once a day. The room temps have been varying from 65F (18C) at night to 77F (25C) during the day. The chamber temps have ranged from 36F (2C) to 47F (8C). With the sphagnum moss as insulation, the temps of the bulbs have been staying pretty steadily at 45F (7C). Between the chamber and the moss, they average out the temperature swings so much that I probably could have gotten away with only one ice change per day from the start and a bulb temperature of 50F (10C). As of mid September, I moved the operation out to the garage. It sounds like more of a hassle than most would want to do, but an ice change is only taking me 1 minute, 30 seconds, not rushing.

I should point out that as well as insulating, the sphagnum moss is acting as an absorbant so as the moisture freezes out of the air on the ice, then melts as the ice warms, it doesn't provide the bulbs the moisture needed to root. As part of the experiment, I'm going to forget to swap the ice for a few days to simulate having gone briefly to Maui with my wife, leaving the kids with the grandparents. :)  Of course this shouldn't make any significant difference as its the same as the bulb growers already do when they pre-chill their bulbs, then ship them.

Note1: This technique takes 3 extra spacers not included with The Bulb Box. If you need them, go to the home improvement center and get 3, 10 inch sections of their 3/4  by 3/4 inch square wood. Its about $0.50/foot.
Note2: The final version did away with the tin foil and added 2 small re-freezable ice blocks to fill in the area available.

How to force more bulbs in the same space

Every year, I come up with some gardening experiments, usually associated with season extension or forcing flower bulbs.  This winter is no different.  I have a few bulb experiments that I'll detail in a few blogs.  I know it sounds kind of crazy, but I already have some bulb experiments planned a year out, for winter 2011-2012!

This year's mental daydreaming resulted in 3 different experiments.  Normally I just plant my bulbs in their pots and put them in The Bulb Box for their chilling.  The pots take up a lot of room, so my first experiment is to see if I can get more bulbs chilled in my limited space.   By manipulating the chilling, water, soil and timing requirements perhaps I can get 3-5 forced pots out of a 2 pot space.  If I'm trying to sequence 3-5 pots through, I'll want to start early.  If sucessful, I might have tulips blooming as early as just before Christmas and continuing till the end of February!


Trying to start this early dictated my second experiment.  I'll need to start the chilling during the warm summer season.  I won't be able to use the refrigerator because it's already full.  Also, fruits and vegetables can give off ethylene gas which causes problems with bulb development and, as a general rule, we don't mix food with inedible or poisonous items.  I'll use The Bulb Box as normal for the cooler weather; but to jumpstart the season during warmer weather, I'll put the base of The Bulb Box on a shelf and use the lid  with re-freezable ice to create a highly efficient ice box.


The cedar sides on my outside raised beds are getting too old and need replacement, so I've dug up my bulbs.  This leads to my 3rd experiment, sequencing bulbs through the garden and into my forced flowers.  I'll blog about them later.


Bulbs go dormant during the summer presumably to live through the relative drought conditions.  To avoid flowering again when the fall rains arrive, they use the chilling requirements to tell them spring as arrived.  Normally, I just plant the bulbs I want to flower in the pot, water and chill them.  With the drought/chilling distinction, I'm going to look at the pot as a chilling container that holds more bulbs than will eventually be forced in it.  Rather than describing it in English, I'll try to in pictures.


The bottom layer:

The top layer:

These are red tulips, about 24 per pot, and 2 pots.  Normally, I force about 8-10 large flowers per pot, so this represents 5 pots of forced bulbs.  In mid October, after 2 months, I'll start shifting them over to potting soil, some moistened, with 2 layers of bulbs and soil per pot.  The pictures show a lot of sphagnum moss.  I've chosen  it to help insulate the bulbs, evening out the temperature they see,  absorbing water before I want the bulbs rooting. and allowing some air flow to help keep down any mold issues.  I hope it works!

Stay tuned!!!

Darrell

Bulb Forcing Chilling Time

Yes, it's early August and most of us aren't thinking about forcing flowers bulbs.  I know!  Here in north Idaho, the harvest season is just barely starting, my early started cherry tomatoes have produced 1 ripe one and the beans are still a week or so away.  Sadly, our raspberries are almost done and it was our best crop so far!  Of course when thinking about forcing flowers, you have to think months in advance, as they have a long chilling period.  Which leads to the topic today - chilling time.

Before I start, I probably should do the standard disclosures.  My wife, Cathy, runs Season Extenders, LLC. which sells the only product designed for forcing bulbs.  It also can germinate seeds.  These blogs will not be focused on selling The Bulb Box, but some of my experiments will likely involve it.

Now, on to the chilling experiment we ran.  So, what about the chilling requirements for tulips?  The Washington State University Extension Agency flyer on forcing bulbs states 15 weeks.  Online, I've seen other colleges state 15-23 weeks, and other postings online with as little as 10 weeks.  So, if I'm going to force tulips, do I have to let them chill for 15 weeks?

I decided to run an experiment where I didn't provide any chilling at all.  My expectations were that I'd get no flowers and perhaps no sprouting.  My results:

• Muscari - extemely delayed and strung out flower generation with normal flower height
• Tulips - extremely delayed flower generation.  Flower stalks were about 2 inches high, funny sort of burned look to them, odd and disfigured
• Daffodils - no flowering at all

The flowering was so delayed that those with normal chilling flowered before the no-chilled ones.


Another example is the picture of Muscari and Princess Irene tulips.  The Irene is listed as an early bloomer.  I suspect their chilling requirements are 15 weeks.  The ones in this picture have only 11 weeks:

All the tulips flowered, but note how tall (short) they are compared to the normal height Muscari.  They sure look pretty though and look even better when it's deep in the January winter!  Below is another picture with Princess Irene, Freeman, Tete a Tete, and again Muscari.  These have had 18 weeks chilling:

Comparing the Princess Irene against the Muscari in the two pictures really shows the shortening effect lack of proper chilling time creates. 

In closing the loop on this experiment, each bulb variety has it's special chilling requirements.  If you want pots with the tallest flower heights, you will need to chill them for the full period, which may vary if you have a mix.  However, after seeing my results, they still produce beautiful displays of color and allow me to display more pots during the winter season!

Till next time,
Darrell

Bulbs and Season Extenders Welcome

Welcome to yet another gardening blog.  As the title says, this one is dedicated to forcing flower bulbs and other season extension techniques and occasional digressions as seems appropriate.  A little introduction and gardening background is probably a good way to start.  My name is Darrell and I live in a zone 5B in a North Idaho snow belt.  As an Engineer, I have a habit of dabbling in improving things and the long winters here have lead me to the hobbies mentioned above.  Our winters can really vary!  At times we have 6 - 8 feet of snow and it lasts forever.  Other times we have winters like this last one, reasonably warm (low of 0 degrees F) where I only plowed once and the kids never got a chance to sled. 


Well enough about me.  For starters, I think I'll talk a bit about one of the most influential gardening books I've read, Four-Season Harvest by Elliot Coleman.  Driving me is the periodic food contamination in our national system and the desire for my kids to taste vegetables as they should taste.  If I don't show them how it should be, who will??  Anyway, Mr. Coleman's description of the 4 season harvest really caught my eye so I decided to do my version of his plastic hoop setup with floating row covers.  Living on a rock "ripple" left by the pre-historic floods here has me using raised beds with soil I brought in.  To accommodate crop rotation, I designed a greenhouse that could be split in half for moving and re-assembled over the next bed the following year.

Greenhouse December 2007

Inside Greenhouse

It's made of welded rebar with slit poly-pipe from Home Depot.  Over it all is a layer of UV resistant gardening plastic.  The poly-pipe is to keep the rebar from wearing holes in the plastic.  For clamps, I have small sections of poly-pipe that I've slit down the center.  With the plastic , the pipe and plastic combo is just a little larger than the inside diameter of the "clamps" so they hold on well.  The corners of them do need to be trimmed on a diagonal to keep from inadvertent slicing of the plastic sheet.  Anyway, enough with the construction.  The execution went quite well despite one of the heaviest snow winters we've had in a long time.  I planted a lot of spinach, arugula, carrots to try Mr. Coleman's "candy carrots", and various greens that he recommended but I've never tried (red kale, miners lettuce, claytonia, etc).


It worked out really well.  However, if I had done a better job with my timing, I would have had a better combination of late Fall/Winter and Winter/Early Spring crops.  We kind of just ignored the carrots which we had actually planted earlier in the year.  They hadn't done very well, so had been left alone.  Anyway, when eaten after winter, they really were quite sweet and an unusual treat.  In particular, I like the convenience of having a good crop of arugula - I love a bunch on a meat sandwich along with some dill pickles.


Two topics come to mind for the next post.  I am not sure which I'll pick:  a failure I had extending the season for some rosemary or an aspect of forcing bulbs.


Till next time,
Darrell