Creating a Garden Gift Basket

Have you ever been given a gift basket loaded with all sorts of goodies?

Garden gift baskets are fun to make and make great gifts for the gardener in your life.  Or, they can be used in fund-raisers.  I recently helped my mother put together this garden basket for a fund-raiser.  We included quite a few items, some of which are a bit out of the ordinary.  The theme of the fund-raiser was “Angels in the Garden”, so we followed the theme when deciding what items to include in the basket.

A pot, soil and basil seeds are all you need to grow your own herbs.

Gardening gloves and a trowel join two “gardening angels” that my mother actually made (she promised to show me how someday).

A lovely hummingbird feeder and hand pruners share space with this beautiful gourd birdhouse.  My mother grew this gourd in her own garden, dried it and created the bird house.  *I have made gourd birdhouses from my own gourds in the past and you can see how to do it here.

Another item in the basket are ‘seed bombs’, which is becoming a common practice in many countries and is part of a movement called ‘Guerrilla Gardening’, which uses seed balls to plant native vegetation in empty lots that are often present in urban areas.  These seed bombs contain wildflower seeds.

On the front of the basket, we included a gift card to a local nursery that the recipient can use.

The base of the basket was filled with crumpled butcher paper, which we then covered with decorative, shredded paper.

The basket was ready, so we wrapped it up and tied it with burlap ribbon.

Other gardening-themed items that you can add to a gift basket include a garden journal, a small potted African violet (or other indoor plant), a Birds & Blooms magazine rolled up and tied with twine, hand lotion and finally, some garden-themed stationery.

Our fund-raiser was made up of all sorts of gift baskets and each one had a bag next to them.  Participants bought raffle tickets and then decided which gift basket(s) they wanted to try to win.  The lucky winner of our garden gift basket bought quite a few raffle tickets and put ALL of them toward our basket.

I was surprised at how much fun I had creating this gift basket and look forward to making another one in the future.

How about you?  What would you include in a garden gift basket?