Daily Dose Blogger Bios
Tipsy Narcissus
Amy P. heard a viscious rumor about paperwhites - they're drunk! She asked me to get to the bottom of this, and as it sounded much too sordid for me to pass up, I did some investigating. Sure enough, the rumors are all true! Paperwhites (Narcissus tazetta) love the firewater!
Here's the lowdown. Forcing paperwhites for the holidays is a lovely tradition. However, they have long, very slender stems that tend to flop over and look less than tidy. Well, the Flower Bulb Research Program at Cornell University actually did a study on this. It seems that switching water for the hard stuff at a certain point in the forcing process makes the stems shorter and sturdier, while keeping the flowers just as big and fragrant as usual. Forcing is done by putting the bulbs in a shallow decorative container filled with enough pebbles to stabilize them without covering them, adding water, and letting nature do it's thing. If you replace the water after about a week with a diluted solution of alcohol and water ( 1 part of your spirit of choice to 7 parts water), your stems will be 1/3 shorter, but your blossoms will be just the way you like them - fluffy and full of good smells.
See - booze makes things better. My paperwhites are going to start swilling tequila this very afternoon!
Thanks for the great content here!
I usually read your blogs in my RSS reader, and photos weren't loading before. But now they are--thanks for making that work!
amorcitos - what an incredible screen name - I'm so happy you can finally see the photos! I try to take them all myself, but the beautiful narcissuss above was captured from Google - mine aren't in bloom yet.
The redesign is great, isn't it? That's our wonderful online editor, Catherine Halley, who is also the ever-delightful Scrappy Girl. She's a peach, that one!
Keep on visiting us here at Dominomag.com!