Upcycled DIY Planters for Valentine’s Day

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DIY planters

Valentine’s Day is right around the corner! What better way to celebrate with your kids than a fun craft that involves gardening, upcycling, and lots of sparkly Valentine’s hearts? I am not usually a super-crafty mom but my love of upcycling and gardening with my girls inspired this project. 

As a third generation AZ native, some of my best childhood memories involve helping my grandparents garden at their farm. That and playing with the baby goats! My girls are true to their AZ “roots” (get, it roots? haha!) and love to garden with their grandparents too. 

This Valentine’s project was also inspired by my sister’s amazing blog that features awesome DIY’s and lots of fun holiday crafts. She sure knows how to make holidays festive! As kids, we loved doing arts & crafts together to decorate for holidays, although it became apparent who had the artistic talent at an early age when comparing our art projects!

This craft is great for any time of the year and also provides fun learning and language-building opportunities (concepts: colors, shapes, sizes, plants, gardening, holidays, fine motor skills, and the list goes on..). The Speech Pathologist in me always has to identify the learning opportunities in a given activity. Without further ado, here’s the project:

What You Need: 

  • Containers you have around the house 
    • Ideas: playdough containers, soup cans, jars, toy containers (my daughters are obsessed with LOL Dolls but don’t play with the balls they come in. This makes my eco-conscious side crazy, so these were on my upcycling list!)
  • Paint, paint brushes, and festive stickers to decorate 
    • We chose white paint and sparkly red, pink, and purple Valentine’s stickers but the sky’s the limit
  • Soil, seeds, flowers, or plants
    • I love Summer Winds Nursery for gardening supplies!

How to Make an Upcycled Planter:

  1. Clean out containers 
  2. Paint the containers and let dry
  3. Decorate with stickers, markers, or paint
  4. Add soil and pot plants
  5. Quicker option– Make your painted container into a vase and add real or faux flowers (use paper or stickers to create petals and attach to popsicle sticks)
  6. Display at home or give as Valentine’s Day gifts!

For those interested in gardening, check out the awesome, free classes at Summer Winds Nursery for great tips on getting started! Here are a few things I learned in a class on container gardening I took:

  • Cactus soil is great for succulents because it provides more drainage than regular soil
  • Other ways to add drainage: place rocks in the bottom of the container or pot plants in a smaller container with holes in the bottom that allow for drainage, then insert into a larger container (in this project, I poked holes in playdough containers and placed them into the soup cans, so the flowers had proper drainage)
  • Check the instructions that come with the plant for directions on frequency of watering, best location for the plant, and how much light it needs

Happy Valentine’s Day!!

Be sure to read around Arizona this Valentine’s Day with our Sister Sites! 

East Valley Moms Blog 

Flagstaff Moms Blog 

West Valley Moms Blog 

North Phoenix Moms Blog 

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