How to Force Spring Blossoms

Hey everyone! It does not work. Hey everyone! Today on garden fork, it is a late winter early spring here. No, it is spring actually because the first day of spring was the other day, technically. Technically, it is spring. It is freezing out here. But we are going to talk about how to force tree blossoms, specifically things like Forsythia here which is really quite beautiful. You can also force Apple Blossoms, Pussy Willows and things like that. So if you have a tree or a bush that usually blossoms in the spring, there is a good chance you can get the flowers to force which means, you can take them inside and get them to bloom a little earlier. And then you get some flowers in your house and it kind of makes you feel nice, except you do not know how I feel about Forsythia. But you do know because I pull out of the ground with a truck. I believe that Forsythia is a weed but other people in the house like it and it is kind of ubiquitous here in New England so. You know, this is really very, very cool and it is very, very simple to do so it is very simple, I am just going to show you how to do it, and we will go now, right? All right! So here we have a big bunch of Forsythia here. And the beauty of doing forcing is, you are essentially pruning and you are also using the prune stuff to have some nice flowers in your house so, when you are going to figure out which blim you want to cut, just think about how you want to prune it. Do you want it to have a nice open habit? You want to cut any blims that are crossing each other, and stuff like that. So we are just going to go in it and cut out a bunch of these. You can also force blim from your apple tree as well. Any kind of plant that you want to force needs to be kind of coming out of dormancy so you cannot do this in the dead of winter. The buds have to be swelling a little bit before you can force them because otherwise, it is not going to work. Apple Blossoms, fruiting tree blossoms will take longer. Sometimes even like four weeks for them to force and bloom in your house so just keep that in mind, you just need a little patience. Forcing is a lot like inviting spring. It has that weird word forcing so we are inviting spring that is what we are doing. I am throwing the ball for Henry and Mitchell. Anyway, here we go. We have got a bunch of these that we collected here from the outside. We collected our mini pruning thing. And there is a couple of ways that you can prepare these for forcing. When you come in, and you are going to put in some water, just recut just like that. Because sometimes when you are outside, but by the time you get inside, air can get in here and block the little capillaries. So, one of the ways that you can do this is you can split the bottom of the twig, the stem, whatever this is called. So you take this, then you can go like that, they do not look beautiful. But you split the middle of the thing to get water up in there, you can also take it and take a carrot peeler and you can peel the bottom of the stem. And yet another way, take these and trim them, is you smash the end of it, like so. So when that is all mashed up like that, it makes it easier for the water to go up into the stem because what you are wanting to do here, is keep it hydrated, and so they will blossom. And you take these, and you put them in your water. A couple of important points here, this is no wonder I do not like Forsythia. I am being overtaken by Forsythia. All right, the couple of things here when you are forcing Forsythia like this, first of all, you wanted to be in a warm environment but not a real hot one. Humidity is important. Do not put it in direct sunlight. Keep it hydrated and you should change out the water every couple of days. It might take a couple of weeks for this to bloom. What you are doing with peach blossoms or apple blossoms, it might take up to four weeks or so. Make sure that the plants are coming out of dormancy before you do this. That means that the little buds here are starting to swell. That means, it is coming out of dormancy. That is a big technical term. And you will get stuff that looks like this. And it is great because you are going to prune it and throw it in your compost pile anyway. So just throw in some water, and make your house look nice and you did not have to spend a bunch of money for florist or anything or so. All right, there you go, very simple little garden fork episode there about forcing tree blossoms, bush blossoms, whatever you are going to call them.. We are going to put some information on the greenhouse. Come to the green house. If you watch us on iTunes, would you write a review on the iTunes page for us? Could you do me that favor? Because the more good reviews we get, they might put it on the front page of iTunes and that would be really cool. All right, thanks for watching, and make it a good day. I will see you later.