tulip

Watering is one of my worst jobs. I've been procrastinating with all my pots and vases until this morning when I've managed to catch up with the task. Most hyacinth vases don't need much topping up - the bulb seems to act as a plug preventing evaporation but the smaller bulbs (crocus and tulip) don't always fit so well and are prone to needing more regular topping up. With this many pots and vases it's a bit overwhelming!

These crocus are actually from potted crocus I bought. I would have more but I left them outside while repotting them and forgot about the squirrels. Of course they ate them all before I remembered to go and rescue them.

For some reason these Red Hunter tulips are not blooming properly in this pot although they did do very well in the trough growing on grit. There's lots of colour but the flowers just aren't opening up.

I also have 2 sad looking hyacinths which I don't even want to picture here. Those are the final bulbs for this forcing year.  Almost completed my notes on my forcing results.  Do let me know your successes this year (julie @ gardenwithindoors.org.uk).

These Red Hunter tulips are taking longer than the other pot I had of them (one of the Shorter troughs) but I was pleased to see the first red bloom this week.

I think this may be my last hyacinth bloom. I started it mid-December. The other two bulbs I did not put in the cellar and they don't look like they're going to bloom but I was wrong about some of the others so they may surprise me.

I'm still experimenting with what bulbs work best in these Shorter and Son flower troughs, the main problem being finding small enough bulbs. I think these red tulips (Red Hunter) are a good fit being quite small and producing some very nice flowers on reasonably-sized stems, ie not too tall  (sometimes forcing bulbs can produce leggy stems).

Here they are a couple days later. I am very impressed that they've all bloomed. (They bent over leaning towards the sun. I turned the trough the other way to encourage them to bend the other way to straighten up.)

Another tulip variety in the truffle bottle is also performing well, Little Princess. I'm still improvising tulip vases as I still haven't found any. I've reached the conclusion that they do not exist.

I have more double-stemmed hyacinths appearing every day. I'm intrigued about why these have suddenly appeared this year when I've never had them before. I'm not sure of the total. I'll have to count up how many I've had.

Here's another double-stemmed example. I had trouble taking a pic that showed both the main flower and these buds on the secondary stem that hasn't emerged yet so I'm afraid this will have to do.

These are my best crocus ever with multiple flowering stems. These are my second flush of crocus blooms and for a while I was wondering if they would grow at all as some didn't even have roots a few weeks ago but they have certainly caught up now.

These crocus have not performed so well. Of this variety I only have 1 bloom which I almost missed. It's already wilting and I didn't even manage to get 1 photo of it at its best. The other bulbs are rotting underneath.

When I noticed the bulges in the stems I knew that these would flower soon. It wasn't long before the first red appeared.