Narcissus Buds - 1/13/2011

Chinese new year is on Feb 3rd this year and it's time for my annual narcissus carving. This is a style of manipulating the blossoms of narcissus. Each year, I attempt to not kill the flower bud in hopes the bud will develop into beautiful and fragrant flowers. It is auspicious to have narcissus and other flowers to bloom on new years day. It takes about 28 days for the flowers to bloom, so I'm pretty sure I won't make it for Chinese new year, but I hope to at least see some flowers. First, I start with a narcissus bulb. These photos were taken with the Lumix ZS6 and I think the white balance turned out quite well. In fact, I think it did better than my canon 50d! I use an exacto knife to basically carve out about half of the bulb to expose the white flower bud deep at the base of each green shoot. This way, as I understand, will force the green shoots to stand up instead of growing straight. After it is carve, I clean off the dirt and soak overnight to start the rooting.
Then the bulb is placed into a dish of water and the root areas are covered w/ a wet towel. The wet towel will absorb the water to feed the roots of the narcissus. Each day, the water is changed. I will hopefully continue to post the progress.
So far, I have four blubs (only three are shown). Hopefully, I'll be seeing flowers in 28 days or so.