Growing Hyacinths for Your Christmas Decoration

Hyacinths come in many colours and shades thereof. This wide range of choice makes them ideal for your life Christmas decoration for use either on the dining table or any other surface. To keep dirt at a minimum, you are able to make them bloom with only water and no soil. Doing this is no great secret and creates even less fuss.

My grandmother used to have hyacinths for every Christmas as part and parcel of the decoration. A lovely smell of fresh flowers pervaded the more commonly known Christmas smell. She used hyacinth glasses to force grow the bulbs. The glasses had come down to her from her grandmother, and many years one was unable to procure any at all. But these days you’ll find them all over the internet ranging in price from reasonable to exorbitant.

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If you don’t want to spend your money on hyacinth glasses, almost any glass will do that offers a safe platform to stand a bulb on. Just about any glass with an opening smaller than the bulb will do the trick, just as long as the bulb is not put into the water in the glass.

The short list for the ingredients needed in this recipe is short indeed. You need a hyacinth glass, a bulb, and water. There is no need for any plant food or fertilizers; water from the tap is all the bulb needs to start growing the first shoots. Put water into the glass up to the inside edge that builds the platform on which you place the bulb. Your planting job is now done.

The glass with the bulb now goes into a cool and dark place, either a cellar or a garage, and if you have neither, the fridge will serve as well. Check regularly that there is enough water in the glass and refill when necessary; that is all the care needed. After about six weeks you will start to see the first white tips pushing out of the bulb. When these tips are clearly out, it is time to move the glass and its occupant into a slightly warmer, but not hot, room and some light, but not full sunlight.

After the shoots have grown a little bit more and are turning green, it is finally ready to move to full light and warmth. And still the only care needed is to replenish the water. The bulb will push forth the full flowering stem in time. The time needed for the complete process is about 10 weeks, and once in bloom, the flower will stay fresh for about three weeks.

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If you wonder why this particular trick works, it has to do with the properties of waters. Even in the cold, water evaporates. These water vapours cling to the bulb and trigger it to put forth roots down into the water. But water doesn’t contain any nourishment for the bulbs, which means at the end of the bloom there is nothing left in the bulb to make it worth saving. This means, you are able to do some fixes if needed, for when the bloom gets too high and heavy, it might pull the bulb off the glass. Take a long stick and push it through the bulb right into the glass to bind the stem to and straighten it. If you are using lower glasses you might want to glue the bulb to the glass top on one side (don’t forget you want to fill in water from time to time).

Hyacinths come in many beautiful colours and shades, pink, red, white, blue, and yellow. This should be ample choice for you to set them into your Christmas decoration. If you are looking for more ideas, there are other bulbs than can be forced. You’ll find a comprehensive list in Mystfy’s Forcing Bulbs.

If you have a garden and want hyacinths planted there, I recommend Marina Taylor’s How to Grow Perfect Hyacinths and Produce Flowering Bulbs. In this article she covers every aspect you need to know to plant hyacinths in your garden successfully.