With a piece or two of floral foam, some medium gauge wire and greenery and pinecones from your yard (or a garden centre), you can decorate the front of your home with a Winter window box.
I spent a good portion of yesterday out in my garden; working on my winter window boxes.
I don’t usually decorate my window boxes, but Loblaws had a great deal on greenery (which is usually far too expensive for my budget), so I thought I’d give them some life.
Which is kinda funny given that I planted dead branches in them. lol
That made me laugh.
Let me show you the before’s so you can see how sad and neglected they look:
This is the window box outside my second storey bathroom. The snow the other week killed off the last of the petunias and my lack of watering killed off the last of the mums. (Hey, it’s a tough window box to water!)
This window box is outside of my office window and next to the front door, so it’s something I notice every time I come home.
The bundles of greens at the grocery store were three for $21. On the rare occasion that I’ve purchased winter greenery in the past, they have tended to run close to that for one bundle. I don’t know how all of these interior design bloggers can afford to hang those beautiful draping greens around their front doors and down the banisters etc?
Sure I’ve chopped greens from trees in my yard before, but now that the lowest branches are about 6′ up, I can’t reach. (I perhaps chopped excessively lol)
I digress; I put a couple of blocks of floral foam in the centre of the window box and ran a dowel through and into the soil to give it some rigidity in the hopes that it won’t blow away.
One is slightly lower than the others because I wanted to put a birdhouse in the centre and if it stood too high above the box, it would have tipped.
I picked up some draping cedar branches, some more rigid pine branches and a few dollar store picks.
I tucked the cedar into my winter window boxes first, to get the drape to hang over the edge, tucked in the more stiff pine branches and then tucked smaller cedar branches in on top. Where I could, I pushed the branch ends into the floral foam, and where I couldn’t, I pushed them into the soil so that they wouldn’t easily fall out.
I had some thin gauge wire in my garage, a bit thicker than floral wire, and cut lengths of it to wrap around the bottom row of my pinecones.
Twist the wire to hold the pinecone tightly and then poke the wire end into your floral foam.
Yes, I had to hang my ass out of my second storey window to make the higher Winter window box – the things I do for Christmas!
I cut the stems off of my dollar store picks with wire cutters and then tucked a branch here and there to look like a light frosting of snow had settled there.
I decided to forego the red picks, gold ornaments and ribbons so that my window boxes would be appropriate for the entire Winter season and not just this time leading up to the holidays.
I did however, find these awesome outdoor SOLAR fairy lights! 72′ long, something like 200 lights and all solar powered so I don’t spend a penny on lighting them through the entire winter!
72′ was far too long per window box, so I just draped them back and forth and around again to get sparkle throughout. The lights have 8 modes so you can set them to stay on or flash, or twinkle or fade… whatever you want. Press the power button and they will automatically turn on at dusk and turn themselves off at dawn!
(Amazon affiliate links so you can find what I bought. For full affiliate disclosure, please see sidebar or bottom of the page)
I have no idea if they’ll last more than this winter, but right now I’m thrilled with them and went back and bought 3 more boxes (2 strings per box). They come in coloured, cool white and warm white. I should have gone for the warm white, but hindsight is 20-20 right?
My evening photos were terrible, so you’ll just have to imagine perfect sparkles of light peeking through the branches.
SOOOO much better than the dead and crusty plants that were there before.
Look! you can see them in the chairs from when I threw them out the window and forgot to clean them out before photographing. (facepalm)
I’m not wishing for snow or anything (yet), but it certainly would finish the aesthetic of the Winter window boxes out nicely.
If you want to learn how to make a Holiday urn, check out my blog post where a Sarah, professional florist from Heirloom Greens & Gardens, showed me the ropes! (There’s even a video step-by-step!)
Have a great one!