Will it also work on bulbs which failed to flower.
Can you give us why of it.

How will this effect the bulb? And will it work for bulbs grown in the garden?
Di

Actually, as I experience, you can keep your bulbs for very long in a refrigerator. If you have enough bulbs, you can have flowering amaryllis in your home year round...

It would be nice to have your amaryllis rebloom again in 5 weeks specially if it is one of your favorite ones. BUT, I think I don't have the guts to cut of everything, scapes and leaves, knowing that the plant would be requiring these leaves to be able to build up energy and bulb size.

We, amaryllis growers in Zone 7 and lower that do not have a greenhouse to grow them in winter time, only have a few months (6-8 months)of warmer weather to grow our amaryllises outside. Sometimes, that length of growing period is not even enough for other varieties that are slow to wake up in spring or are just slow growers. By fall and the temperature is going down to the 50s and 40s, some of them have not even given out 8 leaves and I had to keep them inside in a bright window for a few weeks to give them some extra time before they are made to rest in the unheated garage. Cutting of the leaves would mean cutting off approximately 8 weeks of growing period thus affecting their performance for next season. It is a risk that I am not willing to take in exchange for another scape of flowers.
I personally would rather have a healthy long living amaryllis than a reblooming bulb that could be suffering from this process. I would definitely not try this process on newly purchased bulbs.
On the other hand, this would be a very nice idea for places with warm weather where amaryllises grow all year long.

I have hundreds of bulbs, so it is just a matter of timing to have flowering bulb in the house year-round... I would let the bulb sit and gather energy for the next show after it finished the performance.

ewohryn,
Please reply.
ARIF

O K Di = yes it will work even better in the garden than the pot. No, it does not hurt the bulb to do it one time. It is possible that if you get the very small 2 year bulbs (22/24cm for large flowered varieties) that are grown by the Isreali technique it might not work for 3 or 4 bloomsets consecutively.

Mariava = To have confidence try it on a common variety(inexpensive) bulb from a mass marketer. Or try it on a bulb that is in flower now when the flower shrivels, but before the scape shrivels. It will either bloom again with a new set of scapes or just go into the growth state and put up this year's set of leaves.
About growing in zone 7 down to 4. In the area of Chicago
bulbs can be planted outside in well drained soil with the widest part of the bulb as the soil line. In the fall people who lie there now and former residents were able to
rake oak leaves and pine needles[pine straw] to a depth of five inches on their amaryllis bulb beds in the fall and take it off in the spring. Ordinary straw can be substituted. A man 20 miles north of Cincinnati uses 3 inches of leaves & tops it with 2 inches of straw. If you are colder or deeper snow than Chicago, add more crisp leaves or straw and cover with a moisture barrier even as simple as a plastic trash bag slit down one side & across the bottom. By using deeper leaf/straw insulation & a moisture barrier and covering earlier and uncovering later in the spring, you can tune this cold climate technique for outside beds into parts of southern Canada and those
legedary cold areas of the Northern US.

Arif great to hear from you. You are doing much more with
breeding than I. I am really enjoying redefining these
growing techniques that are becoming very useful to people around the world. We have chosen a wonderful and amazing plant for our passion. Some of the princeples are applicable to other bulb plants as people are just starting to try them.
Now, will it work on bulbs that failed to flower. The short answer is no. healthy mature bulbs that fail to flower are too deep in the soil or pot. So why do some bulbs bloom when they are deeper than others that have stopped blooming? Because the reason the flower scapes
cannot come up, but the leaves can is leaves are thin and
can get out of the narrow neck of the bulb to grow even when the soil is too deep or too compacted-settled-heavy to
let the flower scapes(stalks) come out of the neck of the
bulb. I know this is startling to consider. One of the best ways to see this is to take a fresh new commercial bulb and measure the neck - then plant it in a pot or the ground - water it and when the flower scapes start to come out measure the size of the neck again to see how much it expanded to let the wide flower scapes out as to the narrow expansion to let thin young new leaves out. What about the people who plant an amaryllis bulb too deep in pot or ground and it still blooms for 2 or 3 years. This is
because the amount of soil the neck had to push aside or lift with the upper curve of the bulb was still loose from being recently planted. The steps of a bulb that is stopping bloom is 3 flowers one year; 2 flowers next year; then only extra long leaves. If you have a bulb that did not flower, It will almost always flower if you raise the bulb so the widest part of the bulb is the new soil line.
I have had this work for me and others even if it was raised as late as the end of June.
Now, the Consecutive Blooming Technique requires that the bulb is in the blooming stage. You got it there because it was spring or it was a new bulb that you planted or you used one of several forcing techniques or you raised a bulb that was not blooming. It is now in the bloom stage.
Before it goes into the growth stage which is when the scapes shrivel after bloom or or seed production; you cut the leaves so close to the top of the bulb that the LEAF growing tips are cut off. The bulb cannot go into the growth state and stays in the bloom state by sending up next years set of blooms.
Does it hurt the bulb? Not with one or two of these treatments. Members of my Amaryllis Study Group have done this on the large flowered tall garden type and the large flowered short pot types bred in South Africa as well as a few gracilis and miniatures. I have done a very old orange type found in the yards of old houses in Florida so I got 4 bloomsets in one year and was surprised that it did bloom the following spring.

One of the imnportant was that I propose people use this technique is to share it with your neighbors so that in a few years there will be neighborhoods and even entire districts where people will come to see amaryllis gardens in bloom spring to summer like the shorter seasons of Cherry Blossoms.

EACH ONE TEACH ONE. E. Wm. Warren

Wow, very interesting information. Only, it's kinda late for me! Maybe next time.

Xuan

Bumping up this old thread, about making our bulbs rebloom in 5 weeks' time.

Has anyone tried this, if not on purpose, by accident?

Hatta