An early spring indoors

I love flowers. I am looking forward to one day having an outdoor garden where I can make them grow and constantly enjoy them. I hope that along with her bad joints, Mom passed down her green thumb to me. In the meantime, I have a few indoor house plants that I haven't managed to kill yet and a few colorful blooms that occassionally show up in a vase for me.

While I love flowers, I generally think that florists prices are ridiculous. Having just planned a wedding and after nearly suffering a breakdown at traditional florist prices, we got all of our flowers from a grocery store. They were beautiful, and they were half the price. I often follow suit when I'm out doing regular grocery shopping and pick up a couple of bunches of flowers on my way out. Our local store generally has them for $4 per bunch.

Imagine my happiness when I come home on my birthday, and my wonderful husband has done the same. He showed up with pink, red, and white Gerber daisies (some of my favorites). I trimmed and stuck them in a vase before we attempted to venture out into the thundersnow. I was sadly disappointed when a couple days later, the red and white ones were severely drooping. I've always had problems with getting my Gerbers to stand up for very long - I guess the stem is just really weak.

However, instead of just chucking those red and white beauties, I decided to try something else. As a wedding gift, we'd gotten a big, beautiful glass bowl that's been filled with various decorative filler as a centerpiece on the table. I emptied the bowl and filled it with water. Then I snipped all those unsubstantial stems off and laid them atop the water. The pink ones which seemed to be doing ok on the stems were snipped shorter and  put in a smaller vase by themselves. The results? Beautiful.

 

Pretty good, huh? They're starting to wilt a bit, but they've been alive for well over a week now. Pretty good for $12 of grocery store flowers. Thanks, hubs!