Herbs in the house

My Aerogrow has been out of control lately, shooting herbs right up into its lights, but I'm always loath to waste any fresh produce in winter, so this morning I pruned the plants and then placed them in tiny bud vases. Not only is it nice to have a little green in the house, but I'm hoping the herbs stay healthy for the next few days so I can use them in my Christmas cooking.

 

I've also been working on propagating some rosemary cuttings I took off my mom's rosemary plant at Thanksgiving. I think the little baby plants are putting down roots, but I've been covering them with a plastic bag to keep them moist. Yesterday I was shopping and saw this vase in the floral section for $3! I turned it upside down over the plant and made a poor woman's cloche. Love it! Since using a cloche seems to be just about the only way I can keep any plants alive, I might be investing in more of these very soon.

 

Wrapping it all up...

Every year, I like my Christmas presents to match. I'm a little OCD. This year, I wanted to go very simple. My thought was to wrap all the boxes in plane matte white paper and then to adorn them with construction paper. I got the idea from Real Simple, one of my favorite magazines. The other advantage is once the presents are wrapped the kids can help with the "adornment". Here is a gift we wrapped as a trial run. I basically used one color of construction paper, in this case green, made the bow and scattered dots and "flowers" around the paper with the glue stick (gotta love raiding your kids pencil box to complete projects!)

 

On this side, I "split" on of the flowers across the construction paper ribbon and added one little red dot, just because I could.

 

And finally, threw a red flower on top so it looked "Christmasy". (I don't actually think that is a word, but I'm gonna use it anyway)

 

I'm still waiting for the UPS man to deliver a few more boxes and then we will sit down and attack them all at once. I'll let you know how it turns out.