Yellow Apple Basket Flowers

Sustainability folks and homesteaders alike seek to re-use things, find new uses for things, and get as much use out of something as possible. I'm just an increasingly more and more frugal gal but when I look up "homesteading" on pinterest I'll tell you that something inside of my heart starts to sing! I did so yesterday for practically an hour while my little guy was napping and it was a gloriously wonderful hour that planted hundreds of seeds in my mind. I'm actually looking forward to gardening and being outdoors considerably more than I already was and I found some ingenious ideas for gardening outside of the confines of our yard that my hubby is not very supportive of me digging up for a gloriously big veggie garden.

Today's project involved that pile of yard waste I posted about a little while back, an old rotty apple basket that I found in my basement during my recent basement clean up and some VERY invasive scraps of yellow perennials that were given to me many years back by my Grandmother.

My Grandmother was a wonderful gardener who had English garden type perennial beds surrounding her home. When my husband and I were first married she gladly split a great deal of her perennials and helped me plant a beautiful bed in my yard. I planted daisies, hostas, lavender, coreopsis, and several other plants with her from her garden. One of the plants she gave me was a very lovely yellow flower, Lance-leaf Coreopsis. That particular plant took over my bed, choked out my other flowers and just spread like wildfire. It's really beautiful but I got pretty mad at it the year before last for eating up all my other flowers and just started pulling it out everywhere I could find its remnants. I also found that it was super hardy, as I threw some scraps into a bucket and they took root in the other yard scraps I had in the bucket and bloomed for the whole rest of the year.

Today I have pulled up most of the remaining coreopsis plants (that have survived despite my having tried to eradicate them two years back) and placed them into this apple basket from my basement. I actually put three plastic jugs into the bottom of this basket as it's HUGE and I did not have enough scrap dirt in my driveway to fill it, plus I wouldn't have been able to carry it full of dirt. The dirt is not the best quality but I did manage to get most of the leaves, grass, and roots out by hand. I'm hoping the lovely yellow super invasive flowers from my Grandmother will bloom in the basket. I really think they will as they are hardy as all get out. And I think it will be a beautiful addition to my front bed at ZERO cost to me. I like the rustic look of the basket too. If the experiment fails I have only spent a small amount of time putting this basket together and will have lost nothing. This is my kind of homesteading beautification.

Now you must try and imagine these flowers in that old apple basket in front of my house. Of course I will post a photo later on this year if this experiment ends in success.