Plant Easter Grass on St. Patrick’s Day!

You might be wearing green, but on this cold, sleety, gray St. Patrick’s Day, you might also consider planting green! That is, if you want your colored eggs to nestle into a natural green nest on Easter morning.You will be able to bypass the tangle of pink and purple plastic shreds if you grow your own beautiful green grass.

This is fun and easy to do, with or without a child’s helping hand! The hard part is remembering to start the project a few weeks before Easter, but luckily Easter is very late this year and you have been alerted in time.

You will need:

A flat bowl or casserole dish

Potting soil

Small amount of grass seed

Plastic wrap

A misting spray bottle of water

A sunny window

Fill the bowl almost to the top with earth or potting soil. Sprinkle ordinary grass seed on top of the earth. Spray thoroughly with water from the misting bottle. Then cover with plastic wrap. Set in a sunny place. Each day take off the plastic, mist again, and then replace the plastic.

After four or five days, the grass should be sprouting. Remove the plastic wrap; continue to mist daily whenever it seems dry.

When the grass sprouts taller than three or four inches, you may clip it with scissors. Keep misting and clipping and your green nest will be ready for this:

Watering and tending the grass is a great activity for Lent and in anticipation of Easter morning. I like thinking of the words of this poem from the Psalms, as I mist and spray and clip.

“He will endure as long as the sun, as long as the moon, through all generations.

He will be like rain falling on a mown field, like showers watering the earth.”

Susan Yoder Ackerman is a writer and gardener in Newport News, Virginia. Both her writing and her gardening are enhanced by tending a century-old family farmhouse and eight grandchildren that come and go. You can email Susan at [email protected].