Amaryllis Year Round: Growing Season, Dry Rest and Reflowering

The shape of the year

An amaryllis runs on a cycle rather than a calendar, and you control where the cycle sits in the year. It needs a long growing season of five to six months with strong light and steady feeding, then a dry rest of about eight weeks with no water at all, then six to eight weeks of warmth and water to produce the flower. Add those together and one full turn is roughly nine months of activity, which leaves you room to place the flowering where you want it.

That flexibility is the reason bulbs can be sold for midwinter flowering in one place and midsummer in another. The bulb does not know the date. It responds to warmth after a dry rest. Count sixteen weeks back from the date you want flowers on the table and that is the day you stop watering.

The rest period is the piece people leave out, and it is not optional for reliable reflowering. A bulb kept growing continuously will sometimes flower anyway if it is very well fed and very well lit, but most will not. The dry rest is what triggers the bulb to convert stored food into a flower bud instead of more leaves.

Everything else is in service of that. The long growing season builds the material; the rest converts it; the warm watering afterwards pushes it out of the neck.

The dry rest, step by step

This is the part that decides whether you have a flowering bulb or a pot of leaves. Eight weeks is the minimum and ten is better. The instruction is simpler than people expect: stop watering completely, keep it cool and dark, and do nothing at all until the time is up.

1. Stop watering on a chosen date Pick the day by counting sixteen weeks back from your target flowering date, and stop entirely from that morning. Do not taper, and do not give it a little because the leaves look sad. Note the date.
2. Move it somewhere cool and dark A garage, a cool cupboard, a cellar or an unheated spare room at 50 to 60F (10 to 16C). It does not need light because it will have no leaves. Keep it above 45F (7C); real cold damages the bud inside.
3. Let the leaves yellow and remove them Over three to four weeks the foliage will yellow and collapse. Pull each leaf away only when it comes with a light tug. Once they are all off you have a bare bulb in dry compost, which is exactly right.
4. Leave it alone for eight to ten weeks Check it once a month by feel: it should stay firm and heavy. A bulb that is shriveling badly by week eight can be given a light dribble of water at the rim, but this is rare and usually means it went in underfed.
5. Restart it deliberately At the end of the rest, repot into fresh gritty potting mix in a pot one inch (2.5 cm) wider than the bulb, top third clear, water once and move it into warmth at 70F (21C). From here to open flower is six to eight weeks.

Some growers leave the pot on its side during the rest to make it obvious it is not to be watered. Whatever the method, keep rested bulbs away from where you water other plants; a single well-meant watering in week three restarts the leaves and cancels the rest.

From repotting to flower

The first sign of success is a blunt, thick, gray-green nose pushing from one side of the neck, usually within two to three weeks of the first watering. A flower stalk is fat and rounded at the tip; a leaf is flat and pointed. Seeing the difference at this stage tells you immediately whether the rest worked.

Do not water again until that shoot is about two inches (5 cm) high. From then, water when the top inch (2.5 cm) of compost dries out, keep the pot at 68 to 72F (20 to 22C), and give it the brightest position you have. Turn it a quarter turn every day without fail from the moment the shoot appears, or the stalk will lean out of the pot and stay leaning.

When the bud at the top begins to swell and split, move the pot to a cooler room at 60 to 64F (16 to 18C) and out of direct afternoon sun. This slows the opening and roughly doubles how long the flowers last. A large bulb often sends up a second stalk about a fortnight behind the first, which stretches the display to a month.

If a bulb is going to be top-heavy, deal with it before it flowers rather than after. Stand the pot inside a heavier outer container, or put a slim cane in at the very edge of the pot with a single soft tie below the flowers. Do not push a cane in close to the bulb.

The long growing season that pays for it

Once the flowers are finished, the plant is only halfway through its year. Cut each stalk to two inches (5 cm) above the neck as it finishes, keep every leaf, and switch the plant from being a display to being a growing plant: warm, in the strongest light available, watered whenever the top inch (2.5 cm) is dry and fed every ten to fourteen days.

Move it outdoors as soon as nights are reliably above 55F (13C), after a week of hardening off in light shade. Sink the pot to its rim so it does not blow over and so the compost holds an even moisture. Switch to a high-potassium feed for the second half of the summer. Bring it back under cover before the first cold night, checking the neck and leaf axils for mealybugs and slugs as you do.

By late summer you want six to eight healthy leaves and a bulb visibly wider than it was in spring. That is the whole test. A bulb in that condition will flower; one with four thin leaves and no increase in girth will not, and the honest response is to give it another six weeks of growing before starting the rest, accepting later flowers this time round in exchange for having any at all.

The five dates worth keeping

Record the date you stopped watering, the date you repotted, the date the shoot appeared, the date the first flower opened, and the leaf count at the end of the previous summer. Five entries per bulb per year, and between them they explain every outcome you are likely to get.

The gap between repotting and the shoot appearing is the most informative of them. Under three weeks means the rest was long enough and the bulb was well fed. Five or six weeks of nothing means either the rest was too short or the bulb went into it underfed, and next year you adjust the one you know you got wrong. Keeping these dates for two or three cycles turns amaryllis from a plant that sometimes flowers into one that flowers on a date you chose.