Seeing all the chocolate Easter bunnies and eggs immediately after Christmas made me instinctively block anything to do with Easter till recently.   Now that there are less than three weeks left, I can put my guard down.

My first post on the Easter theme is this simple floral centrepiece.  No, I’m not soooo organised this year, this photo is from previous Easter .

Instructions

You’ll need:

• container
• wet floral foam
• glass or jar
• grass with roots
• flowers, cut or potted
• coloured eggs

1. For a start, you need a container of any size and shape you like.  I chose a rectangular stainless steel box.
2. Soak a piece of wet floral foam in water and place it on one side.  If your container isn’t waterproof, put the foam into a plastic bag and secure sides with a rubber band leaving the top free.
3. In the other corner put a glass or jar for your flowers.
4. Take a bunch of grass together with roots from your garden, mondo grass from the nursery or any other living grass or plant you wish and place it on top of the floral foam.  Water it regularly.
5. Place the flowers in the glass or jar filled with water.  You can use potted flowers instead.  Tulips are my preferred Easter flowers.
6. To finish, place a few coloured Easter eggs on the grass.  And this cute wooden ladybird made a great finishing touch.

This gorgeous Easter centrepiece is really easy to make and will last for several weeks!

Easter is just around the corner and it’s time to start some planning (I should say it’s the last minute to do so).  If you are celebrating Easter, think about how to green your Easter celebrations this year.

Here are some of things we do at our place:

• Number one: we limit the quantity of chocolate Easter eggs (at least at home)!  Kids really want the Easter egg hunt, however by Easter they have eaten too many at school and kinder.  So we hide about 3-4 small ones per child.  And we rarely buy any chocolate eggs as they keep coming from school, friends and neighbours. When buying chocolate Easter eggs, it’s best to find the smallest eggs, ideally hollow ones that have least chocolate in them.  Organic and fair-trade Easter eggs are now available.  Skip huge Easter bunnies and eggs with lots of packaging.

• At school and kinder our kids make Easter egg baskets form paper or recycled plastic tubs filled with shredded paper.  Refuse bought plastic basket with fake plastic grass.

• We boil and decorate real eggs.  Now that our chickens are laying we have our own fresh eggs.  Usually I boil them with the onion skin for lovely and natural colour:

• We bake the hot cross buns, make Easter cookies and generally all food for the celebration is homemade.

• Easter decoration is arriving on a daily basis form kinder in form of different paintings and paper craft – so I don’t have to worry about that task

• Decorated blown eggs:  we have a set made 5 years ago and still using it.  Simply, make two holes with a wooden skewer and blow the egg out using a straw.  Then rinse, dry and decorate.  You can hang them on some branches (see below), arrange them in a bowl or use them as a simple table decoration.

Here are just some of ideas for greener Easter.

Would you like to share your tips for eco friendly Easter? Please do so in the comments below.