Yellow at work

I don't think that I've confessed, yet, to having purchased another little pot of bulbs. They're so pleasing, and not terribly expensive on the scale of, say, cut flowers. They're $4 for a 4" pot. Seems reasonable to me. This time: daffodils.

The office tulips are coming out, but they are very top heavy.

One tulip is fully open.

One tulip I despair of ever opening. It looks too scrunched up to ever make it.

On the way

Spring is on the way. Everything has that feeling of melting that it gets in spring. And, best of all, the birdsong outside our windows has changed. Sure, there are still starlings and jays and crows, but sometimes a new character pulls by. I'm going to have to learn more about how to recognize birds by their calls. It's a joy to hear the new transients.

Tulips in the office

My office tulips were just about to open when I left on Friday (typical!). They seem to have been given a little too much booze; they are very short. The flower is not really above the leaf. On Monday I'll try to use a real camera to take a picture rather than the crappy photoBooth cheat shown above. They don't get any real sun, but they do get indirect sunlight and nominal full-spectrum light when I remember to flick a switch.

Snow day

We're having a snow morning (oh please, please, PLEASE let it be extended to the full day!) and I am reminded that March 4th is the big bloom day check. Earlier in the week, when the pine boughs were mostly exposed, I peeked underneath them and it seemed that there were a number of little shoots poking up. Now, of course, they're under several feet of snow, but March 4th is two scant weeks away, so they'd better get a move on! Maybe as I shovel, I'll give them some motivational talking-to.

More cheating

The crocuses in my office are done now, and so I popped to the shop and dropped another 4 bucks on 3 tulips. They're supposed to be yellow, too. I fished through quite a number of pink ones to get myself a yellow set. I don't know why I'm so anti-pink. Probably it's just that I'm violently pro-yellow when it comes to little pots of spring to enliven my workspace. Why would I go for any colour but that of the sun?

I'm especially in need of my spring fling because it's gone all grey again. We had a week of lovely bright sunshine (and bitter cold). Unfortunately, we're not getting pots and pots of snow like some of the Atlantic coast to the south of us. We're just getting plain old wintery weather. I can't complain endlessly about the little dribs and drabs of snow, though. I'm glad I'm not digging out 1m of snow. As you can see, our snow amounts to so little that even a pigeon can put a footprint right through it.

In other cheating news, I had a terrible trip to the local seed store over the weekend! What a bummer. They over-charged me by $15 on a $40 bill (did they think I wouldn't notice?) and were really quite evilly reluctant to correct their "mistake". They took a little pile of seed packets, found the most expensive, and scanned that in 4 times instead of actually scanning in all the packets. When I complained that they hadn't scanned in the packets correctly, they then scanned in each packet individually without removing the 4 times scan charge! Humph. When I finally got out, I was very angry indeed. And needless to say, I didn't complete my purchase. So I'm looking for a good on-line mail order source for seeds because I can't trust the local rotters. It really did get me down. Still does.

cheating

That's as good a picture as I can supply, I'm afraid. It's of my cheating flowers. I plopped $4 on a little pot of forced yellow crocuses, and it was well worth it. I haven't done anything to make them happen except spend four dollars. I know I KNOW I should be buying bulbs in bulk and forcing them myself, but I haven't, so this is what I get. It makes me happy to see yellow flowers in my office on a cold January day.

Even if they are a cheat.