How to Plant a Hanging Basket, Pt 3. (Herbs)

(For Part 1, please go here. For part 2, go here.)
Welcome to part three of our hanging basket series! Herbs! This basket was definitely the darling of the evening.

Start, again, with an empty pot and some good dirt. (Melissa likes Miracle grow.) Remember not to fill the pot all the way – after you fit all your plants in, you will add the rest of your dirt.

Melissa started with a nice tall Rosemary in the center of her basket.


Do you see those crazy brown roots at the bottom? She just up and ripped them off. When the plant is root-bound like that, it does no harm to remove them. They will grow back!

Then, pick out 6-7 of your favorite herbs and go to town! When you pick your herbs, think about height, and make sure they can all deal with the same sun environment.

Start with your “centerpiece”, and then pop your shorter herbs around the edges.

Generally, Melissa removes the tags from ALL of the plants she…plants. She makes an exception for herbs, though – when you absolutely must remember what everything is, so you can use it in the right dishes, tags are rather important! (Seriously…I can’t be the only person who’s ever mixed up mint and sage from the garden….right??!)
Dig out a small hole, then fit your herbs down into the holes.


The basket is starting to come together!

The finished product! You can see that this basket is more utilitarian than its sun and shade counterparts. This basket is all about having yummy fresh herbs all summer long…out of the reach of slugs, bunnies and other sneaky ground-dwelling thieves!

As a surprise, our lovely host Julie pulled out a festive hat and put all of our names into it. Three lucky ladies went home with the finished baskets.





Thank you so much for joining me! I hope you enjoyed learning about hanging baskets…and a big welcome to all of the church ladies that came over for a re-cap! Hope to see you at our next class!

How to Plant a Hanging Basket, Pt 1: Sun loving

Hello, y’all! A few nights ago, my ward Relief Society put together a class on planting hanging baskets. We have a very talented, and knowledgeable, sister in our ward (Hi, Melissa!) who has been working with soil and plants for over a decade. She graciously agreed to teach us what she could in an hour. She planted three baskets – one for the sun, one for the shade, and one full of herbs. Today, we’ll look at the sun basket. (The class was held in Julie’s gorgeous home, and we were so grateful! Thanks, Julie!)


Our line up. She chose some gorgeous, and tall, vining geraniums for the center of her pot. Around that were some fluffy greenery and trailing petunias.

Behold! The pot!


You start by filling it about 4/5 of the way with dirt. (Melissa prefers Miracle Grow Potting Mix, since it has all sorts of fertilizers already in there.)


Make sure that your pot has a hole, or a few, in the bottom. This makes sure that your plants’ roots do NOT end up sitting in a puddle of water. Water puddles + roots = sad plants. If you find a pot that you simply MUST have that doesn’t have holes, you can carefully drill holes in the bottom. If the pot is too delicate for that, you can add a layer of gravel to the bottom of the pot.


When planting your flowers, go ahead and pinch off any dead blooms. This will encourage new flowers to grow. (On a geranium, you pinch off the blooms at the bottom of their stalk, back where it meets a leafing branch.)


Next, add your petunias (or other medium-height flower). Just dig a little hold and pop your petunias in.


Last, she added these fluffy green guys. (Sorry, I cannot for the life of me remember what these guys were. But they’re fluffy. And green. Help?) She had a brilliant little trick – she planted them sideways. The roots are nearly horizontal so that the greenery will trail over the side of the pot.


Then she took more dirt and piled it on top to cover the roots, at the end. This also fills in any holes around the plants. You want the dirt all the way up to the top of the pot now, so go ahead and fill it up.

When the dirt is all in, go ahead and give your pot a few good taps to get everything settled in.

After the pot was finished, Melissa mixed some of this Quick Start fertilizer with water, and gave the plant a good drink. (We jokingly called this Hormone Replacement Therapy. It encourages the plants to put out new growth.)

(Also, a cool tip? If you are gone for a weekend, and come back to find your potted plants all droopy and sad, you can feed them some of this and they will perk right up. Be careful, though, and make sure you water with CLEAN, fertilizer-free water afterwards to wash off the leaves. If the fertilizer-laced water is left on the leaves, the sun will produce big brown spots on the leaves.)


And the finished product!!
Stay tuned for our other baskets!

A day of Making

Every once in a while, the stars will align, and I'll get about 45 minutes in the afternoon to craft it up upstairs while the kids entertain themselves on the main level of the house.

On this particular afternoon, I was rather proud of myself. I finished up a baby quilt top. Yea me!


When I came downstairs, BBJ ran up to me. Mom! Come see!

The good girl had made her bed. 

While big sister was busy "making her bed", Siu Jeun was busy making something else. 

A mess.

To each their own Making!

How to: Get Stuff Done

One lovely winter evening, we invited some friends over for dessert. Nothing too fancy. *snort*

Alright - Lo Gung requested, and received cream puffs. (By the way, I think I still owe some of you the recipe. Working on it!)

After we'd had our fill, Heidi pulled out a bag full of a QIP (Quilt in Progress) and asked for my help in pinning it to its batting and backing.

No problem! But first...what to do with all the chil'ens? I mean, it's kind of difficult to pin together an enormous quilt...if kidlets are constantly running over it with tricycles, right?

First, the big kids:

Rock Band took care of them! (Yes, Lo Gung, daddies are included in the Big Kid crowd.) Oh, and check out this kid's chops! B Boy was GROOVING.

BBJ wasn't doing too badly, either! (I think...yes, I'm nearly positive - she's playing the drums with an enormous bubble wand. Hrm...a lot safer than handing her drumsticks!)

Now, for the littlest one...turning him loose in the same room as that many buttons is probably hazardous for everyone's health. What to do....I know! How about turning him loose with some chocolate pudding while firmly locked into a high chair?

Why do genius solutions....always seem to create more problems! At least we got the quilt pinned together. Oh, and he got to practice his Spoon Skills. He's getting pretty good...I think half of that pudding actually made it into his mouth!

How To Make Cookies With Kids

1) Corral the squirreliest of the young 'uns in the appropriate manner, and bribe them with crackers to remain reasonably quiet.

2) Give the Divas among them the appropriate gear (including, but not limited to, LoLoCraft aprons, old fashioned whisks and melamine mixing bowls)

3) Instruct the children in the correct way to do the work for you. We can't have flour flying all about, now can we? (If flour should happen to fly about the kitchen, that would be an appropriate time to teach your child the correct way to use a damp rag to mop the floor. This skill will become invaluable in the future, and can never be learned too early.)

4) For best weight loss results, be sure to place the cooling cookies right at toddler eye-level. You'll find that you eat far fewer cookies this way. (As an interesting side effect, you'll also find that your toddler is no longer hungry when dinner time rolls around. Further investigation is needed to discover the reason for this phenomenon.)

5) Reward good children with the end result. (Of course, the naughty ones don't need any, as they have already snitched their fill from the ones cooling on the counter.)