If you ever decide to force hyacinth bulbs, and I hope you do, you will be rewarded with an amazing show of stunning and fragrant blooms like these! However, I do have to retract a statement I made way back in December, in which I told you, my dear readers, that hyacinth bulbs do not need a cold treatment in order to be forced indoors in water. Now technically speaking this is true, if you want to wait three long months to get something gorgeous like this, but I can’t imagine that forcing a bulb to bloom is supposed to take that long!
Soooooo, next year I’m going to place my hyacinth bulbs in a paper bag in the fridge for 6-8 weeks before placing them in water, and then I would think the wait will be much shorter. Unless of course the bulbs freeze in the fridge, which is what I was always worried about, and why I have yet to try it! Maybe some of my readers in the Southern hemisphere would like to do a test run? Give your bulbs a cold treatment in the Fall, and then simply place them in a container with water and rocks or marbles, such that the bottom of the bulb is just touching the water. That’s it. So simple with such amazing results. And the big surprise here is that I hit the aesthetic jackpot and ended up with a bloom in each color, all the better to share with you the wonders of nature and the excitement of forcing bulbs!
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