Pushing Up Daisies

This past weekend I helped decorate at

a party where we grew grass in containers

to be used as centerpieces.  The party was for

a guy so we didn't use a lot of flowers except

for a few daisies in vases on the food table.

I wanted to experiment with the party leftovers

to see how long daisies pushed directly into the moist

soil of the grass would stay presentable. 

You never know when that info would be

helpful in decorating for a future party.

When I couldn't find the kind of daisies that

we used at the party (the ones in the bottles),

I had to settle for the ones that have a

single bloom to stick in the grass pots.

The single bloom daisies had long sturdy stems

that I hated to cut off but you have to in

order for them to look right in the grass.

The daisy stems need to be long enough that

they will peek up over the top of the grass

and also be able to have at least one inch

of stem in the soil. 

Things just look better to the eye

(I don't know why) when they are in

a group of odd numbered objects so

for most of the containers I used 3 flowers.

Isn't that great to demonstrate that an odd number looks better that there is a flower from another pot in the photo?

This little basket has four containers in it

so I put a daisy in each one.

These photos are just a kind of re-creation of

the party decorations. At the party we used burlap

 tablecloths and wound twine onto the necks

of the bottles to tie them into the burlap visually.

These little galvanized buckets were so small

that I didn't try to put  flowers into them.

They had flower labels on them already.

By the time I got home with the "new" daisies

even in the west-facing side of the house,

I was running out of day light for this re-creation/

daisy-in-grass experiment photo shoot.

See the sunset in the background?

So the party had to be moved indoors

and use artificial lighting for the pictures.

Here are the same party elements arranged

in a more of a straight line fashion.

               I'll update this later to keep you up with how long

the daisies last in the grass soil but as of 12 hours,

they look fresh as a....well you know what.

UPDATE:

After 18 hours, only one of the daisies is a fail

being only in moist soil.  So this lets me know that

unless a party is in a hot outside location, that these flowers 

would probably last for several hours with no problem.

Cost-wise the grass seeds themselves are really inexpensive.

I got a large bag of rye grass seeds three years ago for $12

 and have used it for lots of centerpieces...I'm estimating the

seed for these would be about $2.50.  The daisies were $15.

  I already had the bottles and galvanized containers (and you

probably have bottles and pots you could use) but if you

 had to buy them, it would probably be about $75 for all.

So everything all together would be less than $100.

I did a couple of blog post last Spring on how to grow the grass

for decorations and different ways to use it.

Growing Grass for Decorating (my first blog post ever)

 and More Grass Centerpieces