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In the fall at Costco there are bags of bulbs for sale. I always pick up a bag of Paperwhite Narcissus. Since Paperwhites are easy to force indoors, I repackage three bulbs in a glass cylinder from the dollar store, and add a care label and voila, they become really nice Christmas gifts for teachers. My careful planning went amok when the snow days hit, and school was cancelled for the two days before winter break, meaning no school holiday parties. So I was left with 25 bulbs in a sack in the breezeway. After Christmas was over and the decorations packed up, the house was looking rather drab. It's that letdown after the hyper excitement of prolonged festivities. The weather didn't help much by alternating between snow and heavy rain. Gray, gray, gray. I decided to launch Spring indoors and force those Narcissus bulbs... all 25. Maybe they would be in bloom by Valentine's day. I had no idea how fast those things take off! I put "planting day" on the calendar, and got out every tall glass vase I owned. Then scrounged up all the small rocks, glass marbles, and agates I could find around the house. Good thing my kids are rock collectors!
I planted as many bulbs as I could cram into the vases and bowls. Some of the bulbs were sideways, but I figured the stems would right themselves once they started growing. Adding water was what jump started them. You can see that the bulbs in the vase on the far left still haven't grown much... it's because I wanted to space out the flowering so I hadn't added water to those yet. The ones on the right were about 4 days along... that's how fast they grow!
This was after about 8 days... you can see that they are almost ready to pop open. Very exciting!
On the first day of February the blossoms burst out of the buds. The house smelled amazing! I got some plum tree prunings and stuck them in the vases to support the long stems which had a tendency to lean over with the weight of the blooms.
One of my kids started sneezing profusely, and because this coincided with the indoor blooming of a field's worth of Narcissus, I thought she might be allergic. Nathanael was tasked with putting all the Narcissus in our bathroom... natural air freshener? Turns out she had a cold, or else Nathanael, Katrien, and I all started allergies two days in succession (ha, ha). It's so lovely in the house though, really helps me get through the yucky late winter days to have all these flowers everywhere. Definitely something I'll repeat next year.
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