Everything you ever read or hear about bulbs is clear: plant them in the fall. They need a season of cold in the earth before they’ll spring to life again in the mud of April. And that was my plan. Fall planting. I thought a lot about it, I looked at some tulip bulb catalogs… And then it was Thanksgiving. And then it was Christmas. And yet I still hadn’t ordered or planted a single bulb.

I am, in almost every area of my life, a procrastinator. Why do now what you can do after watching twenty minutes of the Daily Show on Hulu? Despite the fact that gardening is a hobby, something I do for fun BECAUSE I LIKE IT, this personality trait still creeps in. This is how I found myself in January thinking, forlornly, maybe I’ll have tulips next year.

But here’s the thing — I already waited a whole year. Last spring, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden had thousands of beautiful tulips on display. Seeing them, I vowed that next spring I’d have an explosion of tulips myself. See how pretty they were?

That long ago “next spring” is (almost) now. Rather than glumly accept a sorry state of tuliplessness until the distant year of 2013, I decided to do something slightly dramatic and potentially bungled (familiar territory for procrastinators everywhere). Last week, I went online and ordered several hundred tulip, crocus, and daffodil bulbs. (Like I said, slightly dramatic). I had to do a special search to make this happen. With most bulb sellers, the window is closed. You can pay them now, but they won’t send your bulbs until fall. Luckily, the internet directed me to a tulip purveyor of ill repute and no regard for seasons. My box of tulipomania arrived yesterday. I planted the whole lot of them this morning.

These bulbs may rot in their pots, refusing to send out shoots or flowers, deprived as they’ve been of their full cold season, and I’ll have only myself to blame. But, oh man, I’m hoping.

Tags: bulbs, crocuses, daffodils, spring, tulips