Drumroll please, here’s my first garden crochet project.

I’ve spent the last winter dreaming up fun ideas about how to use crochet in the gardens.
Now, I’m no crochet expert, I’m actually quite a novice, but I love it, I love doing it and how beautiful the end results are. It’s safe to say that I’m hooked on crochet (pardon the pun) especially in it’s decorative capacity.

I have many, many ideas spinning round my head of ways to use crochet in my gardens and finally, after thinking that they’d never see the light of day, I can reveal the first of these projects …..

Crochet cane toppers!

I use short bamboo canes to marke the sections of my beds in both gardens and I’m forever tripping over them. I never fancied spending money on those plastic cane toppers you can get (see image below), so instead I’d maybe pop a small pot over the canes so I didn’t bump into them, but that looked really messy.

Over the winter I developed a little obsession with crochet flowers and earlier in the Spring when looking over the very bare beds in the tunnel I had the brainwave of using crochet flowers to top the canes – combining both beauty and usefulness. I was sure it had been done before, so I went to google, typed in ‘crochet cane toppers’ and suprisingly came back empty handed. Surely I was’t the only one crazy enough to spend time making crochet to top canes, was I?

So, I changed tack and looked for crochet flower pencil toppers, of which there are quite a few. Then, if necessary I just adapted the patterns to make the pencil topper wider. I also found a pattern for pencil grips and made a fat version with a closed top as a cane topper that I then sowed crochet flowers onto… and voila … I had my cane toppers.

It may not be practical to use them everywhere, but the fun aspect is just too much to pass up. That’s part of the essence of gardening with spirit for me (as well as the nature connection / communication), to go with my my sense of fun and creativity in the garden, even when it’s doing things that may not seem too sensible but bring me a tremendous amount of joy and happiness.

You can do it too.

If you want to try this yourself, why not try the daisy cane topper? I got the pattern from the lovely Maria Stout from her Etsy shop, Cuddle Bug Kids. Here’s how they look when she makes them.

 

Now, back to the planting.

In other news, I have sown some peas and broad beans in the tunnel, found some self seeded celery and been debating netting the tunnel doors to keep the butterflies out. I cover all of that in this weeks video, see below (where I also can’t help showing not only my crochet cane toppers but also my crochet adorned pea wigwam).

I have also been busy outdoors, still mulching those beds (and the new horse manure is GORGEOUS), I’ll share more about all that and how my seed sowing is going next week.