Fresh from under the snow

We dug under the snowbanks around the deck to find some fresh thyme for seasoning the New Year's Eve jerk pork. This is Thymus vulgaris, the basic culinary thyme. It's perennial, and we'll be growing lots more of it come spring.

This candle sports a collar of fresh lingonberry. With snow up to my shoulder I managed to clip some of this perennial glossy ground cover to use here. The stems, left uneven for a looser, informal look, are stuck into a wet block of florist's foam.

It's amazing what you can find when you start digging.

Iced greetings

I hung this wreath made with cranberries and scented geranium leaves on one of the plant supports in the garden. Sunshine is starting to chip away at it.

I've been wanting to make one of these for six years, since I worked on a newspaper package about ice wreaths in December 2004.

I used a Bundt pan but any gelatin mold will work. I filled the pan about half full using a bag of fresh cranberries and water and left it outside to freeze. Once that layer was solid, I finished filling the pan with water and left it to freeze.

Found deep in the bowels of the Christmas closet.

Unmolding the wreath was as easy as running a little water over the pan in the kitchen sink. Add a wide ribbon and you're ready to hang it on a post or a trellis or prop it against a snowbank or chair. Depending on the weather and whether it's displayed in direct sun, the wreath can last for days or weeks around here. When it does melt, the cranberries are a treat for the birds and other critters.

Actually, all sorts of ingredients other than cranberries can be used. Orange slices would be pretty. So would rings of green pepper. Other choices include spruce and cedar sprigs, cinnamon sticks, walnuts, and glitter. For one wreath, I added leaves from my peppermint-scented geranium plant for a counterpoint to the cranberries.

This one is just cranberries. I propped it in the snow on a bed of balsam.

Stretching the potting soil

 Plant your petunias in a pot partially packed with plastic packing peanuts. (Yeah, I like alliteration!)

Container plantings are a big part of summer around here. And those big pots can consume a lot of soilless mix. Here's a tip for reducing the amount of potting soil you use that I originally posted in comments at awaytogarden. It bears repeating now that I'm actually putting my containers together.

Take some plastic mesh vegetable bags and fill 'em with packing peanuts. Stuff the bag in the bottom of the pot so that it's about one-third to maybe one-half filled. Fill the rest of the container with soilless mix and plant as usual. Because the peanuts are in a bag, it's easy to separate peanuts from potting soil when emptying containers in the fall. The bags of peanuts go back into the shed to be used again the next year.

I do this with the big clay pots in which I'm planting annuals that will get tossed at the end of the season. The pots don't weigh nearly as much so they're easier to move around, the plants do just fine with ordinary watering and fertilizing and I save on potting soil. However, I don't recommend this for anything that stays in the pot long-term, such as the brugmansia that is overwintered indoors or the mother plants for my scented geraniums. I also don't cheat with packing peanuts in pots that need bottom weight to balance a potentially top-heavy load such as a trellis covered with sweet peas or other vines.

No packing peanuts? I've been known to use damaged plastic six-packs or small pots to help fill out the bottom of big pots. That works just fine, too.