Fun & clever live plant solution for thin horizontal spaces – Part One
One of my goals this year is to make my living/family room area a soul space. This is a small room with two doors, an open entryway to the kitchen and two low windows on each of the longer walls. The most visible spaces for decorative touches are long, narrow slices for hanging. Since most commercially available suitable stuff made me yawn, I decided to get busy with a creative home-made solution.
Why not make it interestingly multipurpose with a decorative component to house plants to feed my spirit and delight my taste buds? Not so easy in a room where sunlight is sparse, but doable with the right mix.
This is a fun (although fairly time-consuming) DIY project that doubles as a wall hanging with visual appeal and a practical cooking grab stand. If you have a space that gets good sunlight, you can mix in flowers.
Decorative herb wall hanging shopping list
Material costs are manageable, particularly when you consider what it might cost to buy something a few grades up from prints or wall decorations available at , say, a Big Lots®, but more than you might think. Your time, including plant care from seed to assembly hearty for unit construction is probably going to run about 4 hours, assuming you don’t need to prep the lumber (pull nails, sand, stain, etc.). Here’s what you’ll need with approximate costs:
Vases: An hourglass shape is critical to be able to easily secure to a board. They’re harder to find than I imagined. Ultimately, I found a perfect solution (at Walmart, of all places) for about $2/ with tax ($6 total for your piece).
Rocks: These are sold in 5-pound containers as small natural stones (you can do glass discs too – not my style but maybe yours – these come in smaller packages) in a variety of colors. Go with something small enough to fit through the narrowest portion of your vase. Half-fill the vases for a decorative enhancement that also guards against drowning your plants (you will overwater at first – just look at how much water is gathering in the stone area to adjust). You’ll have more than you need at a cost of about $5.
Hardware: You’ll want a secure way to attach the vases to your board. My long search ultimately led me to the plumbing isle. A 1¼ inch 2-hole pipe strap worked perfectly for the vases I selected. I was screwing into a pretty substantial piece of wood, so a 1 5/8ths length wood screw worked well. If your lumber is narrow, go shorter. You’ll also need supplies to hang your project. This includes 24-guage galvanized steel wire and screw eyes. Hardware costs include two-hole pipe straps at about $2 for a 4-pack; wood screws at $8 for a 1-pound box; wire for hanging $5; screw eyes are about $2 for a 6-pack.
The rest: of course, you’ll need soil, seeds and a piece of wood to anchor into. The latter proved the most difficult to locate (there’s nothing I could find in traditional retail outlets that’s suitably attractive). Ultimately I wound up contacting a friend rehabbing an older house and found some gorgeous pieces ideal for this project. You’ll also need some cardboard (just use a shipping box – no added cost) to cut discs to go between the rocks and soil. Good, organic seed packs usually run $2 – $3/. One cubic foot of decent soil runs about $10. I also purchased two colors of ribbon for about $7 ($3 for a solid color and $4 for a more decorative one).
You’ll have more than you need of just about everything, but my total tally for supplies on this project (this will go down to a lower per unit figure once I create more as gifts and for retail sales) was about $50, not including the power tools (you can do this project without them).
Come back next Friday to see how to put this all together (with lots of photographs).
