Planting Paperwhites

Sometimes when you are trying to achieve a 12 month garden you have to go inside. This is a picture of a shallow bowl that I found at a local thrift shop before Christmas. When I saw it I knew that it would be the perfect container for planting Paperwhites.
I went to my local orange home store, you know the one that I mean, and got a large bag full of pea gravel for a little over $4.00. You can buy chips of marble stone but I thought that these looked more naturalistic, and I could use the leftover stones for planting in the spring to give my outdoor container pots some drainage. I started this project on January 7th.Then I scooped the pebbles into the container and filled it almost all the way.
I purchases two boxes of Paperwhites at the home improvement store for $5.98 each.
They came with plastic planting pots and peat pots which I put away for other jobs.
Next I gently pushed the bulbs into the pebbles, so that they were half way covered. The white "necks" should be up. After that I added more pebbles to give them something more to hold on to, without covering them up.
A dish garden like this does will in a sunny window, so I found a spot in my front hallway and added water.

Believe it or not they started growing in just a few days, and those brown strange looking bulbs with those white "necks" grew and turned green. Jan 7th.
This picture was taken on the 13th. They grew.And grew. This picture was taken on the 16th.
This picture was taken on the 19th. The only thing that I did in addition to replenishing the water, was to rotate the dish a bit when I thought of it.
Now you'll have to wait a day or two to see the flowers, but I thought that you might want to start the garden as soon as possible. The buds are ready to pop. Have fun with this. One warning, these flowers in bloom might have a strange fragrance , but beauty hath no pain, as they say. Next blog, the flowers, promise.