Bulbs: What to do with unplanted bulbs?, 0 by LeawoodGardener

LeawoodGardener wrote:
Thanks for your comments, Rita and Kay! I'll bet you don't miss the KC winters, Kay! Rita, I'm looking forward to the photos of your blooms - you outdid all of us when it comes to kilobulb planting!

I'm hopeful these bulbs have been chilled enough to bloom, even though it's now March 9 and I just planted them. I know landscapers in Florida buy chilled bulbs (or buy them and do their own chilling) so they can have big beds of tulips in bloom for Easter, but I'll bet they plant them in February. Anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained and the bulbs were a gift, so here goes.

I bought a couple bags of moisture-retention potting soil and filled a pair of concrete pots and few spare pots I had in my basement. Last fall I potted up the tulips I had planned for all of my big urns and sank them into an annual bed to force (I'll probably pull those up and place them in the urns sometime in the next couple of weeks - when it's not quite so muddy in my garden), so I'll find additional places to use these pots. Depending upon when the tulips bloom, I may use them to replace the bulbs in a couple of the urns, since these will surely bloom later than the bulbs I started last fall (if they bloom at all).

After planting the bulbs in the pots and topping off with soil, I added a layer of slush from the remnants of the snow on my patio. I did this, not so much to 'chill' the bulbs, as to give a source of moisture to thoroughly soak the pot. The potting soil was fairly dry and I didn't feel like filling watering cans indoors to bring outside (the hoses are rolled up and stored), so I thought this would be a good way to water them. We're getting a light mist of rain, which is supposed to continue overnight, so maybe the pots will be thoroughly soaked by morning.

This message was edited Mar 9, 2013 3:27 PM