Usually it’s just soup for one, salad for one, wine for three.
– Edna Krabappel
I’ve been assiduously saving cobalt and green wine bottles so I could have a bottle tree this year. Time got away from me and I didn’t make the “tree” part, so it’s more of a bottle garden. But anything to cheer up a long winter (winter just started, but they are always long).
Plus, the bottles trap evil spirits. So we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.
I did it this way instead of hanging them in the cherry tree (behind the bottles above) because the bottles were too heavy for the ends of the branches. Plus, having the bottles on sticks instead of tree forms let me move them around until the deep ground frost set in.
I should have taken off the labels, but I bet they’ll all fall off obligingly by spring! I left a few stuck in the ground as if they were sprouting. That turns out to have been a not-brilliant idea — the bottles need to vent so that temperature differences inside and outside the bottle don’t cause breakage (one of my “sprouts” is cracked, so I’ll have to dig out the pieces in the spring).
Fun and easy to do, but it takes some advanced wine planning!
What do you do to deter bad spirits cheer up the landscape over winter?
