March 20, 2014 by C.Condello

A Plant A Day Till Spring – First Day of Spring – Snowdrops

“First Flower – First Photo” – Whitney Avenue – Wilkinsburg, PA – So here it is… The first Snowdrop I found blooming this year… In fact… This is the first flower of 2013… At least in my neck of the woods… This is also the first flower photograph with my new camera…
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I took a bunch of photographs of this patch of Snowdrops… But none of them compared to the first shot… None of the other shots could touch the way I feel about this single photograph…

A Plant a Day till Spring” will highlight one plant a day, starting on the winter solstice (December 21, 2013)… And ending on the vernal equinox (March 20, 2014)… If all goes to plan I will be starting with old Snowdrop photos from 2013… And ending with new photos of Snowdrops in 2014…

Today is the first day of spring!

There’s something about the warmth of the spring sun… Coupled with the chill of the fleeting winter winds… To me… This is the first sign of spring… This is the first sign of life…

Spring calls to me… Another cold snap away… Yet… She is right beneath my feet… Right before my eyes… The sun emanates… Spiritual solar display… Warm radiating glow… Melting snow flows…

The spring sun shines on my face… Cold winter winds on my back… Searching for color… Searching… Searching for signs of another season… Another reason…

Another reason to get out of bed… A reason to rationalize why I’m not dead… When we have nothing… We have everything… When we have everything… We have nothing…

Essentially… None of this matters… Who cares what we can buy… It’s all garbage… It’s all fake… What really matters is what you can make…

Or what makes you…

Are you nothing more than a cause?.. Or are you the effect?.. Are you the building blocks that they use to erect?..

I personally… I am the builder… I can tear them down… And I can build them up… Give me a vineyard and I’ll put wine in your cup… I’ll put life in your cup…

I have come across another spring… Another day… Another moment on this earth… Another heartbeat… With you…

Today we celebrate… Celebrate the sun… Celebrate the land… Celebrate life… Celebrate the simple little fact that today… We as gardeners get another shot… Another opportunity to sculpt life… Another opportunity to turn our garden dreams into reality…

It all starts today… March 20… 12:57 PM Today… We all have something in common… Today… We all dream of gardens… We all dream of spring…

plant petunias and question everything – chriscondello

This is the end of the series… From this point forward I will return to my regular random format… A big thank you to everyone who has been following along throughout the winter… Without your regular comments I never could have finished this series… So thank you…

This website and all of the information presented within is provided free by the author… Me… It is my sole opinion and is not representative of anyone other than myself… You can contact me directly with questions at – c.condello@hotmail.com

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December 21, 2013 by C.Condello

A Plant A Day Till Spring – Day 1 – Snowdrops

“Galanthus Close Up” – Spring 2013 – Whitney Avenue – Wilkinsburg, PA

Today is the winter solstice… Today marks the beginning of Winter… To celebrate the occasion… I am dropping the first post of what I hope becomes an annual series… Each post will be devoted to keeping the cold winter days warm through daily doses of the garden… Now… I don’t know about you… But I get pretty depressed during the cold winter months… One of the few things that gets me through this time of year is dreaming of the flowers of spring… This year I have decided to share those dreams with the rest of you…

“A Plant a Day till Spring” will highlight one plant a day, starting on the winter solstice (December 21, 2013)… And ending on the vernal equinox (March 20, 2014)… If all goes to plan I will be starting with old Snowdrop photos from 2013… And ending with new photos of Snowdrops in 2014… This year winter is 89 days… So technically… I only have 88 more posts to go…

I am not planning a standard format with these posts other than featuring one plant each day… These posts will be in addition to whatever else I post… And could include anything from permaculture information to original poetry… The intentions of this series is to share the warmth… And share some knowledge…

“Naturalized Galanthus” – Spring 2013 – Whitney Avenue – Wilkinsburg, PA

Galanthus… Meaning “Milk Flower” – AKA Snowdrop… Fllower in winter before the vernal equinox… All Species are perennial, herbaceous plants that grow from bulbs… Each bulb produces two or three leaves and an erect, leafless scape, which supports a single flower. The seeds produced by this plant have a small fleshy tail containing substances attractive to ants which distribute the seeds…

Snowdrops naturalize easily… The bulbs will self propagate in the garden… This can be easily facilitated using a propagation technique known as twin-scaling, which is really nothing more than slicing bulbs up into smaller pieces… New bulbs will form in profusion on the exposed parts… This is basically a last ditch effort to survive… I accidentally found this method after slicing through a clump of Snowdrops in my own garden… I left a bunch of the split bulbs on the surface and much to my surprise they started growing hundreds of new bulbs… A quick Google search later and I had found twin-scaling…

Annually I look forward to the neighborhood Snowdrops… I speculate some of the patches are at least fifty years old given the age of many of the houses… The patch shown in the photo above is behind a hundred year old Victorian home on my street…

I look forward to this patch of snowdrops more than any other flowers around… The energy that is associated with it spans generations… And as I spread them around the neighborhood… My energy grows as well…

plant petunias and question everything – chriscondello

New To writing and never had to site sources before… These “Plant a Day Till Spring” posts are simply intended to kill time until spring… My source is Wikipedia.org… The photography is all my own… And I am adding my own information… But much of this is just related from the web…

This website and all of the information presented within is provided free by the author… Me… It is my sole opinion and is not representative of anyone other than myself… Although this website is free… I sell prints of my photography here – www.society6.com/chriscondello – or you can contact me directly with questions at – c.condello@hotmail.com – Although it isn’t a requirement… It helps…

I also accept Bitcoin donations… My digital wallet address is – 1JsKwa3vYgy4LZjNk4YmPEHFJNjPt2wDJj

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.