Jennifer Kirschnick: Hello! This is Jennifer Kirschnick with Baltimore Garden Company and
today we are showing you how to do some fun holiday decorations for the
outside of your house. The next thing I am going to show you is how to
make a reef, not a pre-made reef, but one that you have to make
completely yourself. It will probably take you maybe close to an hour to
do that yourself but we are just going to show you the main steps of how
to do this. The first thing you do is -- you need a cage, foam to attach all
your greens to and you can get these at most craft stores, like, Michaels or
Jo Ann. This particular one is made by a company called Kinsmen (ph), it
is a pretty substantial one, they come in different diameters, you can get
huge ones or you can get very small ones and this is just a cage, that you
can disconnect like this and then you put in your floral foam inside. I have
broken a brick of floral foam into smaller pieces and before you put your
foam in, just make sure you soak it in water for two or three minutes to get
it wet.
Then when you put your greens in it, it just helps to keep the greens a little
bit fresher. So, once you have your foam in your cage and I have a bag
down here because you are going to make a mess, so just make sure, you
protect in nice table cloth or anything. Then you just start adding your
greens and you want pieces that are maybe 8 inches long or so. You
basically just start putting them in around the frame, all going in the same
direction, again you want them out to be around the same length and you
just work your way around the frame. It is nice to use a floral foam, you
do not have to use some people use wire and we will use a little bit of wire
later.
But for now we are just going to keep putting the greens in the foam. This
piece is actually bent a little bit. So, I am just going to use the whole piece
because it fits nicely with the shape that we are trying to make. Again, you
might just have the cut pieces off of your branches to get the right size that
you want. This is actually Fraser fir, that I am using, you can also mix it in
with some pine or you can make the whole reef the same type of green, if
you want the whole thing to be fir, but we are going to use the couple of
different kinds and I am going to mix it in and intermingle the pieces
together. You just continue doing this again, all the way around the frame
and you are just hiding the base of your branches, any brown part.
This one is pretty big, so I am going to cut this one down and then once
you do the top of the frame again, you want to keep adding pieces to the
inside of the frame and the outside until the whole thing is covered. When
we come back, we will show you how to add direct of the accent pieces to
the reef.