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Hi, I am Dave Epstein, welcome to Growing Wisdom. And you know, the end of winter, beginning of spring, it is tough in some parts of the country. You want things like this but it is just still so cold and snowy outside.

So one of the things you can do of course is you can force bulbs. But you can also force branches. You can force branches of things like Forsythia. So we are going to show you how to do that today.

Alright, so when you want to force your Forsythia plant, of course you got to find it outside. Make sure the temperature outside is 32 degrees or higher. Find the cutting where it looks like there is a nice buds. Look how many buds there are in this? And then get a nice hunk of it. And you want to get several of these cuttings so, we are just going to take one right now and we are going to go inside and show you how to force this and how to get flowers out of this in just a couple of weeks.

You want to strip the bottoms of the branch or the side branches. I do not want any of this side branches under the water. So I am just going to cut this off here and I am going to cut them off generally about a foot because, that is about how much of the branch is going to be stock in the water.

The next thing I want to do is I have got this little jar here, just a vase. I am going to fill this with hot water. You do not want it boiling but you want hot water. So, we fill that up just a couple of inches of very hot water and then, I am going to make one more cut in an angle of the Forsythia branch,

And into the water it goes. And I am going to let that sit in there until the water cools up. That is going to be a couple of hours. I am just going to leave it in there.

After a few hours goes by, I can fill up the rest of the vase or fill it about half way with just lukewarm water at that point. And then I am just going to let this sit.

Where do you want to put this? You do not want to put this in direct sunlight. You want to put this somewhere where it is bright and relatively cool, so in interior part of the house not in direct sunlight and just leave it. And look what you get after just a couple of weeks.

Now is not that beautiful?

You have just wonderful spring branches inside, a very easy thing to do. The closer the branch is to actually blooming outside, the easier it is to force it inside. So if your branches are going to bloom in another eight weeks, it is a lot harder to force than it would be. It was going to bloom naturally in another two weeks.

So there you go. How to force branches here at GrowingWisdom.com.

Come back every week for all of our hints, tips, and helps here at Growing Wisdom.

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