You’ve probably already grown your Easter grass since Easter is only one week away, but have you figured out how to display your homegrown greens?

We made this colorful Easter grass spring garden using many repurposed items lying around our home:

but you can make yours almost entirely out of items headed for the recycling bin or trash!

Here’s what you’ll need for this fun project:

• cardboard box
• foam flowers (or you can make flower cutouts your own using cardboard, paper grocery bags or construction paper)
• paint & paintbrushes
• glue
• grass seeds & soil
• emptied and cleaned egg shells, baby food jars or any other containers you can find around the house (like plastic bottles cut in half)
• press-on googly eyes (you can cut out and decorate paper or cardboard eyes, too)
• miniature colored pom-poms (or try cotton balls, t-shirt fabric, old socks and other materials in your home if you’re really resourceful)

Easter Grass

I mentioned a few Easter grass tutorials here. My favorites are this one from Rosy Posy (informative) and this one from K.I.S.S. (gift-worthy).

There’s no need for a pot to grow your grass in: any old container will do. We chose a combination of cleaned, dried egg shells and cleaned baby food jars that had been waiting for us to make use of them since these rock candy maracas. If you’re using egg shells, just gently tap around the top of a raw egg with a spoon and the shell will crack just enough for you to pull away the pieces to make a small hole for depositing the soil and seeds.

Garden Base

We always have a ridiculously huge pile of cardboard at our house from all of the online ordering I do and basically all the shopping we do as a family, which - unless it’s done at the Farmer’s Market - involves a lot of packaging . . . and a lot of waste. I can’t bear to chuck it all into the recycling bin, even if it is going to be recycled and reused. I’d much rather repurpose it for our immediate enjoyment!

This project is easy as pie. First, let your toddler paint every square inch of the cardboard box. Then have him paint the foam flowers (or paper/cardboard flower cutouts). Finally, glue the flowers around your garden base.

Spring Chicks

You can use anything lying around your house to make the chicks: cotton balls, old t-shirts, socks, paper. We used pre-made colored pom-poms and stick on googly-eyes that we had in the back of our craft closet. Just stick or glue on eyes and noses to your little chicks and you’re done! We made a few freestanding chicks and some that we stuffed into empty egg shells we decided not to use for growing grass.

The Finished Garden

Once your spring grass has sprouted, you’ve made your garden base and your chicks are finished, just assemble the inhabitants of your garden any which way you want. You can either leave the eggs and chicks free standing for your toddler to play with or glue them down to the base. As an extra detail, we used another cardboard box we had painted to create a colorful background for the garden and decided to add some pastel paper Easter grass for an extra pop of springtime color. (Learn how to make homemade paper Easter grass here).

Our garden is a little crazy and haphazard, but you can make yours as wild or as elegant as your springtime mood desires!

Happy Spring!

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Chrissy – who has written 426 posts on The Outlaw Mom® Blog - Creative Living in a Conventional World.

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