Create your own birch in a box Christmas planter for next to your front door with this easy tutorial! It’s the perfect modern farmhouse style decor piece for your Christmas porch!
I had so many questions and comments come in when I first shared this Christmas planter idea over on Instagram stories a last week, that I knew I had to put a full blog post together about this idea. I visited my favourite local garden centre, The Glasshouse, early in the Christmas season and I just fell in love with the pre-made Christmas planter DIY kits that they had for these. They had these crates made especially for this idea, lined them with heavy plastic, and did the work of attaching the birch logs really well to the inside of the crate, so if you’re local those pre-made kits are definitely an easy solution to creating one of these for your porch!
If you aren’t from the southwestern Ontario area, you could definitely DIY the crate and birch log base of this planter, as long as you can find some beautiful birch logs to work with at your own local garden centre. Be sure to line the crate with heavy plastic before you move on to filling your crate with greenery if you make your own!
Assembling the Birch in a Box Christmas Planter
The first step was to fill the crate with sand. The sand that came with this kit was kept in a heavy plastic bag and was quite wet, and I think that really helped to keep the mess down and make for a really sturdy base to hold all of the greenery. I just used a big soil scoop and the whole process was really quick and easy.
Then came the fun part! We had brought back several different kinds of greens to work with from the garden centre, so that was really fun. Normally I would just cut my own greens from around the property and that would work fine too. These fancy greens really added something though, I think.
My daughter, Kennedy, helped me with this and it made for a really fun “take your kids to work day” for us both. 🙂 We started out by adding some of the largest branches of greenery, which were cedar in our case near the back.
Then we just filled in here and there, placing branches of different types wherever we thought they might look nice.
It really is pretty hard to mess something like this up when you’re working with beautiful fresh greenery like we were. It will basically look amazing no matter what you do. But you’ll look like you really know what you’re doing, which is always fun. 🙂
Once the crate seemed nice and full, we added just a few accents. That’s really all you need. Just a few sprigs of faux blueberries and white berries and two perfect pinecones.
The Finished Christmas Planter
I just love how the finished Birch in a Box looks next to our front door. It feels kind of traditional and yet modern and unexpected at the same time. The perfect thing to help us celebrate our first Christmas with a real front porch.
Have you started decorating your entryway for Christmas yet? What do you have next to your front door this Christmas?
Don’t forget to pin this idea to save it for later!
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Courtenay Hartford is the author of creeklinehouse.com, a blog based on her adventures renovating a 120-year-old farmhouse in rural Ontario, Canada. On her blog, Courtenay shares interior design tips based on her own farmhouse and her work as founder and stylist of the interior photography firm Art & Spaces. She also writes about her farmhouse garden, plant-based recipes, family travel, and homekeeping best practices. Courtenay is the author of the book The Cleaning Ninja and has been featured in numerous magazines including Country Sampler Farmhouse Style, Better Homes and Gardens, Parents Magazine, Real Simple, and Our Homes.