If you’ve ever had a garden then you know about the caring and maintenance involved in having a healthy edible landscape. Every so often it’s necessary to paint your thumb green, pull out the pruners, and get trimming. Sometimes we prune to remove the dead or unhealthy leaves and stems, while other times we prune to redirect and promote growth in our veggies, herbs, and flowers. This week I went to town on my garden. The fennel became a shady forest over the cilantro and parsley, the broccoli rabb bolted, flowered, and towered over the rainbow chard and well, the lavender just smells so good that I couldn’t resist cutting it back just to be engulfed in its scent. I ended up with two different piles of plant cuttings: the dead and the living. The dead pile went directly into our home compost and the living was transformed into home decoration.
After all the hard work that goes into keeping a beautiful landscape producing, it’s a heart break to cut back the good stuff and just toss it. So, this time I was determined to reuse all the healthy cuttings in some fashion. Here are a few easy ways to recycle your plants after they’ve been pruned:
Edible Bouquet:
Some of my herbs and veggies were getting a little crowed, so I made a centerpiece bouquet out of: fennel, broccoli raab, parsley, cilantro, purple kale, and lavender. Making the edible bouquet was such a simple and beautiful way to reuse the clippings from my garden.
Dried Flower and Herb Greeting Card:
My Pansies produced, my Poppies popped, and once again lavender is just the best thing ever. I gathered the fallen petals and it became necessary that I cut back the flowers so they could better produce in the future. Going along with my scheme of reusing the plant clippings, I set my colorful collection in the middle of a heavy book to dry for a couple of days. With the dried flowers and herbs my girlfriend Whitney and I made a cute greeting card for my grandma, sending her a bit of everything from our garden!
Hanging Lavender:
This is the easiest project in the book. In fact it shouldn’t even be deemed a project; but it’s amazing how simple and decorative hanging lavender can be. Just get some thread, tie the bundle together any way you like, make a loop at the end and enjoy it’s beauty and scent.
If your interest lies more in kitchen projects than home crafts, here are some great resources for other methods of utilizing those healthy clippings!
5 Cool Things To Do With Herbs
Maintaining our gardens can be a lot of work. But… it is for our bounty and pleasure that we tend to and make use of our gardens to the fullest and share our rewards with one another. What crafty projects have you done with your garden clippings?
Excellent ideas! Love the article.
I’m drying several bags of rosemary which I’ll be using to make my own body products with. I don’t cook a lot with it, but I do have several recipes that use rosemary (such as a facial steam).
wow that sounds like quite a fun project! Does it take a lot of effort to make your own facial cream? I would love to hear about the process (if you can give away your recipe that is!) Thanks for your input Lane.