Jennifer Kirschnick: Hello! I am Jennifer Kirschnick with Baltimore Garden Company and
today we are showing you how to decorate the front of your house for the
holidays. The next thing that we are going to talk about is decorating a
holiday container. This is if you have a simple container, this is going to
be an informal arrangement. The container, I am going to be using, this is
actually made of plastic, but it is a really heavy grade of plastic and if you
have just a regular terracotta container or anything like that, that will work
for what we are doing.
So, the first thing, once you have your container, what you want to fill it
up with is you can use your garden soil, if you have extra garden soil, you
can just keep that in and then what you want to have at the top, all the way
to the very top is floral foam and again, the floral foam, you can get those
at any craft store, the brick size, it is on maybe 8 inches by 3 inches and
you do want to soak them before you use them for about two minutes. So,
once we have our container filled, almost to the rim with either the soil or
the floral foam, then we can start putting our greens in and we will make
our arrangements.
So, we are going to put the tallest greens that we have in first and for this
container that I am going to do, the tallest piece that we have is this big
piece of Southern Magnolia and as we talked about before, you can get
this, if you a Magnolia in your garden or your friend has one and you just
cut some pieces off of it. Something else we should mention is that when
you do cut these greens, a good way to keep them fresh for longer is to
soak them in some water, cut the stem off and as soon as can get them in
some water and keep them in water until you are ready to use them in your
arrangements.
So, now we are going to put in our Magnolia, it is very simple, you are
just going to put it towards the back of the container and you are going to
place it down in the foam. Make sure that it is pretty steady, so we have
our tall piece in and now we are going to fill in with other kinds of greens.
These greens, what I am mostly going to be using is white pine and fir,
Fraser fir, you can also use Balsam fir, and you are just going to place it
around your tall piece, basically. Just keep placing, you want to put more
of the tall pieces in first and then you will put the shorter pieces in front of
them. Just make sure that pieces are sitting securely in the foam, you want
to do this -- this is really difficult thing to do on days that are below
freezing because everything is frozen, so try to do this on a warmer day if
possible.
We are just going to try to make it really fluffy, filled with greens. So,
now we have most of our greens in, we are going to start adding in some
of our accent pieces for some color and something that I would like to use
in a lot of outside arrangements are these berries that are called
Winterberries, and again, this grows on a shrub, it grows it is native to this
part of the country, the Mid-Atlantic part of the country and if you do
want this in your garden, make sure that you get one male shrub and one
female shrub, that is the only way you are going to get berries is that you
have male and a female plant. So, you just place these in the front of the
arrangement for color.
You can also use American Holly as well, this is just -- we are going to
use Winterberry for this arrangement. You can also use something like
Rosemary, place satins for some extra accent. Then, if you like you can
put in a couple of pine cones, we have these wired onto either just little
stick, this is a little piece of bamboo or you can buy floral stick at any craft
store and it is really easy, you just wrap the wire around the pine cone and
tie it around the stick. Place maybe we will place two pine cones in and
then to finish it off, we are going to add a bow in at the front and again,
with our bow to help it stay in the arrangement, we have just wired it to,
this is just like a little bamboo stick, a very small bamboo stick or you can
get floral picks at the store.
You put that in the front of your container; make sure it is wired onto the
stick really well, so if you have a windy day, it does not get blown away
and then if you see any floral foam still at the base of the container, you
can always take little pieces of Balsam or Pine and hide them by placing
the greens just on top of any floral foam that s showing. Then, you put this
next to your front door and when people come over to visit and to your
holiday parties, then they have a nice welcoming look when they are
walking in your front door. The next thing we are going to show you is
how to make a container that is more formal than this, using more of a
fancy container.