Forcing Bulbs - The bottom of my bulb touches water

by Stephen
(Toronto, canada)

Hi,

I recently bought a hyacinth bulb with a vase. i filled the vase with water under the bulb and placed it in my garage. The problem here is currently the temperature is too low, water in the vase is frozen into an ice and it touched the its bottom.

I'm not sure if my bulb is died already because of the cold temperature outside. It's about -10 degree in my garage. This only happened in 1 day. I placed it on Sunday and found this out on Monday night when I got home.

Do you think if my bulb's still ok to grow.
I'll certainly try to do this again. But this time I can only place the bulb in the basement. The temperature there is about 15 degress.

Hope you can help.
Thanks.


Stephen


Doug says:

Get the bulb into the house and someplace warm.

If you purchased it lately as a bulb for forcing, it has already had its cold treatment (most likely anyway) and is ready to grow.

Freezing it likely killed it but one never knows with these things.

Get it indoors, in the full sun (or as much as you can give it) wait a day or two and give it a gentle squeeze. If it is still hard, it is fine. If softening (rotting) then toss it away.

If it were mine - I'd be growing it indoors right away.

And not tossing it out until it was clearly soft and squishy - not going to grow. Until then - I'd grow it.