Hi, this is Growing Wisdom and I am Dave Epstein and I am in front in some of my planters here which obviously pretty much done for the season. We are going to be cleaning these out and one of my favorite things to do is put greens and berries and things like that in the planters because it just makes them look so nice. Remember, the house is right here so you can look outside and see them. It just does not look so stalked all winter long. It is very easy and very quick thing to do.

So, you have got to of course clean up all the dead stuff from the previous year and rip out any annuals, prune back any of the perennials. I do have a couple of perennials in the box here that will come up next year but the greens would not really hurt them here, some Irises, we are just going to cut those back and get this box ready to be planted with the greens.

So of course, now you are going to get the greens and I just get them from around the yard, maybe just take a nice walk through the woods and get your greens. When you are getting your greens, just think about if you are going to prune, that is how I get them. I just basically go around and kind of prune up things that need to be pruned.

I even like to find some of the branches, some of the dog woods. The bark is just such a great color and that will look nice in there as well. All right, so we have got our nice pile of greens here. Hopefully we have enough, if not, we will go out and get some more, I have got these two boxes. I am going to do them at the same time, sort of alternating back and forth because I want them to look like they are the same. If I do want and then do the other, they are going to look different. It is really just as simple as grabbing some greens and putting them in.

The more greens that you got and the wider variety of greens, the better this is going to look. So, since I am trying to balance them in my mind, I am actually thinking of taking the same green for each of them and just going back and forth. And very quickly, you are going to see how wonderful this is going to look. It is a great idea if the soil is nice and wet because that will help these to stay green a little bit longer.

You want some of the bigger in the middle and the weepier stuff at the edges. You could light this up if you wanted to, you could add ribbons or bows, you can go—there is no limit to what you can do. So, what do you think? Now when people come back to the patio or when I am working here late fall, early winter or when I am looking outside, I do not have to look at those boxes which are just empty with a bunch of dirt. I have these wonderful greens to enjoy. It is a very easy way to kind of spruce up some of those planters, containers or window boxes that you might have around your yard.

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