Harvey looks to the outdoors for her holiday decorating ideas

Susan Harvey's skills rival Martha Stewart’s when it comes to holiday decorating, especially when it comes to using plants and flowers.

A Master Gardener for 20 years, Harvey says it is a continuous process. She is learning new ideas all the time and most of them include using natural materials found in her flower garden, along roadsides and in the woods.

"The more you do, the more you learn," Harvey said. “I have two passions, gardening and working with children,” which translates into a lot of volunteer hours at Kalmia Gardens and at Wesley United Methodist Church where she is a member.

The former elementary school teacher and media specialist along with fellow Wesley United Methodist Church volunteers just completed a successful run in the Wesley Pumpkin Patch.

"We had 568 children visit the patch during October," Harvey said.

The children came from public, private and church schools. In the pumpkin patch they learned about pumpkins and other food crops in season such as peanuts and corn. They were also read stories about pumpkins.

Along with the many pumpkins for sell in patch, Harvey decorated pumpkins with ribbons, flowers and fruits and vegetables for centerpieces and sold them at the pumpkin patch. She also has used some in her own Thanksgiving decorating.

Harvey said she got her green thumb from her father, but her artistic talents came from both her father and her mother.

“They always made homemade gifts,” Harvey said. “And my father did woodworking.”

It’s a family thing, she said. Her sisters and her three daughters are also gifted this way.

“I have one daughter who is very creative,” she said. “She is always doing something.”

One of the newest projects of Harvey and other Master Gardeners has been making leaf castings.

A sand casting method is used to make the decorative items, she said.

Large leaves such as collard or cabbage work best. The process calls for placing the leaf face down on sand and then covering it with a concrete mixture to make the mold.

Harvey said when finished the leaves make interesting birdbaths and feeders or can be placed on a coffee table as decorative art or used in the kitchen and elsewhere as a dish to hold fruit or candy.

Last summer during Week in the Wild at Kalmia Gardens, Harvey had the older children make smaller versions of the leaves.

Harvey and other Master Gardeners give workshops on making the leaf castings and have sold them at the Good Living Marketplace. They will also be for sale at the Kalmia Christmas Shop.

The Master Gardeners also will be decorating the Hart House at Kalmia Gardens for the Holiday Open House on Dec. 6. Their theme this year is a Carolina Christmas, and the gardeners will be using as many local items as possible to decorate the house and the tree including pinecones and okra.

Although Harvey decorated her home for Thanksgiving using pumpkins and other traditional items, she said today she and her grandchildren will continue a tradition of decorating outdoors for Christmas.

Harvey’s three daughters get up early to go shopping, leaving the five grandchildren at home with her and her husband Walt to decorate.

Harvey said this day is for the children. It is totally not a Martha Stewart look.

“We decorate the shade garden as Candy Cane Lane,” Harvey said. “This will be our eighth year.”

Each year the decorations become more elaborate, Harvey said. “We have a Candy Cane Lane decorated with huge plastic canes from the dollar stores, a jingle bell tree, and we hide bells for the little ones to find.”

She said they put on Santa hats and Christmas music and spend the day decorating with dollar store purchases. There are candy canes and snowballs out of foam balls are hanging all over the trees.

There is also time for snowball fights, and at the end of the day Harvey makes fried snowflakes for the children to eat.

Harvey said she takes flour tortillas, folds them and cuts them with kitchen scissors into the shapes of snowflakes. She fries them quickly, about 20 seconds on each side, in a small amount of oil. While still hot, she dusts them with powdered sugar.

“It tastes like a crispy funnel cake,” Harvey said. “They are good when they are hot. The children love them.”

She said nutritionally it’s a food only a grandmother would let them eat.

Harvey said her daughters all live out of town, and they stay for the weekend.

On Thanksgiving Day, they had the traditional turkey dinner, but today is their kickoff to Christmas.