Get creative with garden-inspired home-made Christmas gifts

Home-made gifts spell love, effort and thought – and it’s easy to extend that to garden-inspired festive presents.

Whether you create a beautifully scented herb drawer pouch or a jar of delicious home-made chutney or jam, it will mean more to the recipient than something you’ve bought in haste from a retailer.

“There’s so much to be gained from the sheer joy for you as an individual to take time to look at your garden and think about what you can take from there to give to others, but also for the recipients. To receive something hand-made and hand-grown is just a beautiful thing,” says Kim Stoddart, editor of Amateur Gardening magazine and author of the The Climate Change Resilient Vegetable Garden.

She offers a selection of ideas on home-made gifts you may consider creating.

1. Preserves

Chutneys and jams are an ideal gift and one which you could easily make, given the bumper apple harvest and gluts of other fruit we’ve had this year.

Look online for recipes, Stoddart suggests. “For many years my go-to has been the River Cottage Preserves Handbook by Pam Corbin, which is a really good starting point.”

There is still time to make chutney, she says.

“There’s some lovely apple chutneys and preserves that can be easily put together. It takes a few hours and if you don’t have any jars you could purchase some nice ones which looks beautiful filled with chutney. You could do decorative labels and get really creative.”

If you have frozen currants and gooseberries harvested this year, they can easily be made into jams, she adds.

2. Herb vinegars

“These are a nice, easy entry option and easy to work with. Because vinegar is a natural preservative, you can make home-made herb vinegars and put them in different coloured bottles.

“I recommend apple cider vinegar. You could go with one of the varieties that still has the ‘mother’ (a live, fermented culture) which is probiotic and good for your healthy gut bacteria.

“Sterilise your bottles and work with herbs like sage, thyme and rosemary. Just put a few sprigs into the vinegar, you don’t have to overdo it. A hand-length sprig of rosemary in a bottle would create an attractive central feature and you could add some spices, maybe a few peppercorns or fennel seeds.”

You can use the vinegar in a winter salad vinaigrette, as a marinade, or in winter casseroles.

3. Plant displays

“There’s lots of ways to bring the outdoor in to create really pretty indoor displays,” says Stoddart.

Pretty pansies and hellebores can be used to create winter displays along with cyclamen, or dig up self-seeded plants from your garden. Scour charity shops for pretty teacups or vases which you could put them in to give as a gift.

Alternatively, buy a supermarket pot of herbs and divide it into your decorative planters, using fresh compost and picking back the foliage a bit to conserve the energy for the plant to grow on, she suggests.

“If you’ve grown bush chilli plants you can cut them back, pot them on, bring them inside and they will grow on. Give them a bit of seaweed feed and they will grow really well over Christmas.”

4. Bath salts

If you buy an attractive jar and some basic Epsom bath salts, you could then add some dried herbs and even flowers from your garden to infuse with scent. Dry sage, rosemary and mint on a warm windowsill for a few weeks to remove some of the oil before adding them to your bath salts, she suggests.

5. Seed gifts

“A lot of people are doing home seed saving now, and it’s a lovely way of passing on the seed joy. You can make your own seed packets, using dried leaves or seedheads to decorate.

“Just make sure your seeds are thoroughly dry before giving them as a gift.”

6. Cut-and-come-again planters

Grow cut-and-come-again salads and other edibles including Chinese greens, pea shoots and lettuce leaves which you could mix into a decorative planter for the recipient to put on their windowsill and harvest the leaves over the festive season and beyond, she suggests.

“Keep the container away from direct heat, so away from radiators. Ideally, the container should be on a windowsill, the sunnier the better and check the compost from time to time by putting your finger into it. You don’t want it to be too wet underneath.”

7. Winter herb pouches

Sage, rosemary and thyme are ideal for creating fragrant herb pouches, says Stoddart. Your winter herbs will need to dry out, and then you could chop them and add them to pretty pouches, or use them to add to festive pot pourri.

8. Simple decorations

Dry and press winter flowers and leaves, placing the plant materials between sheets of tracing paper and pressing them in books, using other books on top to add to the weight.

Leave them for a few weeks and then you should be able to use them to decorate cards, perhaps using red watercolour paint or ribbon to make them more festive, Stoddart suggests.

You could also make place settings for the Christmas table with evergreen sprigs such as holly, offcuts from your Christmas tree, or decorative seedheads.

9. Wooden coasters

Why not make some coasters out of chopped wood?

“If you’ve had trees taken down, or even some big branches, cut the wood into slices with a saw, sand and varnish it and you can have some beautiful coasters. Try using hardwood, which will last better,” she suggests.