I've written extensively about how incredibly grump-faced I get every January, pretty much since I started this blog. It's an established fact: short days, lack of holidays/birthday fun, and disgusting weather combine to make me a highly unpleasant person to deal with from time to time. One of the best ways I've found to counteract that is having plants or flowers around. Problem? I have, if not a black thumb, definitely not a green one.
I'm that spaz who will buy myself a plant or something and then forget to water it until it's drooped down to the tabletop, or who won't change the water in flowers like...at all. And it's so terrible, because I absolutely adore flowers! I buy them for myself all the time. It's just the care part that I tend to forget about. Given that, to me, growing something "from scratch" seemed Herculean in difficulty. I feel like I kind of cheated on this one, because I let Bachman's do all the work for me and got a pre-potted spring bulb garden. Isn't it cute?
This is what it looked like when I got it in mid-January...not much going on, but I was so shocked by how fast everything started sprouting as soon as I put the pot on my south-exposure windowsill. (I realize, now, that it looks incredibly dorky to leave the little stick-in thing sitting in the pot. I used it to remember to rotate it, because my inner control freak can't handle when a plant leans one way toward the sun. Excuses for my moderate idiocy!)
Less than a week later...
Seriously though, these things are idiot-proof if they are Lizzie-proof. I almost feel like this shouldn't merit checking off a goal. But it makes me incredibly happy, so I'll go with it.
And then they bloomed!
Daffodils are 100% indisputably my favorite flower (which I've mentioned before). Needless to say, I gasped like a small child on Christmas morning when they were the first thing to bloom.
And of course the damn thing chose the week I was gone to go absolutely full-blast...here's the current state of things!
There's a purple-pink hyacinth hiding on the other side, but I'm just completely head-over-heels for those weird little bluebell things and the gorgeous red tulips. There are yellow tulip buds coming up too, and more daffodils on their way (my excuse for ignoring the slightly crispy ones, I've never figured out how not to kill the plant when nipping off dead blooms!). Bottom line: best $12 I've spent in a long time.
There you have it: a 101 in 1001 that totally delivered on the "life-enriching happiness" front! See more here.