Many homes place an evergreen wreath on their door or wall for the season. Traditional holiday wreaths are often decorated with bows, berries and cones. This year has been unlike any other so perhaps it is the perfect time to break out of tradition and try a different approach!
Consider crafting a wreath made from natural materials found in your own landscape. Take a tour of your lawn or property to scout out things like unusual berries, dried flowers, and grasses.
Evergreen boughs around a metal ring are traditional, but think outside the wreath and use perhaps a grapevine form in any shape and add on things you find in your lawn and landscape.
Found items like nuts, acorn caps, pine cones of all sizes, or different wild berries, grapes, crab apples or seed heads could turn your wreath-making project into a treasure hunt! Enlist family members to search for flora and fauna in your own yard, then once you've gathered a good amount, choose your wreath form then use a glue gun and some floral wire to attach the different items to create a one-of-a-kind holiday decoration.
Q: What are some great herbs I can grow during the winter in the window to use for cooking and how do I best care for them? Can you recommend any foods I can grow in my kitchen over the winter that will be delicious and nutritious and not too hard to raise? — Tim, in St. George
You can certainly grow herbs indoors, even in December, January and February. These are dark months in terms of trying to get adequate sunlight to grow plants and it can be tough to get noticeable growth on herbs, even in a sunny, south-facing window.
Still, choose herbs now from your local garden center and look for ones like chives, parsley, rosemary and mint. You can place those in sunny windows and if you don't expect a bunch of new growth, you can still clip some off to season your foods.
As we get closer to March, head back to your garden center to pick up herb plants like thyme and oregano, which will grow faster. If you have an indoor set-up with a grow light, you can grow year-round indoors and everything, even basil, will grow right through the winter.
A simple food to try to grow indoors this winter are microgreens! You can set up trays and racks and plant the microgreens in rotation so you'll have fresh microgreens all winter long.
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