"Shot of Wheat Grass" Favor

Did you know that I am a pun connoisseur? Well, I am. So our wedding favor was one these guys:

Rubber ducky and Lenox angel love the grass.

It's a "Shot of wheat grass". Wheat grass is a popular nutrition supplement. Usually it's juiced, and then taken in a shot form to enhance digestion and immune systems; so at some very earthy cafe's you can actually order a shot of wheat grass juice.

I am not this healthy (you can tell in my pictures and recipes!). I simply love grass. I love laying in grass, the look of it, the smell of it. Grass was in my centerpieces, in my decorations, even on my wedding cake, although it was made of icing.

So I wanted to have a shotglass with a tuft of grass sticking out to be our favor. I wanted it to be like a play off of centerpieces like this:

But ever the re-purposer, I wanted the grass to be useful to my guests. So I looked up functional grass, and decided between Lemon Grass (can be used in cooking) and wheat grass. I went with wheat grass mostly for aesthetics. But when I realized that it would be a literal shot of wheat grass...the pun was the clincher.

So here's the deal with wheat grass. It needs to be timed very well. And wheat grass can be a bit high maintenance. So we bought a wheat grass growing kit online. It came with the soil, the seeds, fertilizer and growing trays, which was great. We bought shot glasses (with love written in binary code) from Discountmugs.com  (Very reasonable)

We set up a table lined with shot glasses (not in a fun way) and filled each with soil and fertilizer (yes, all 175 of them). We covered the top of the soil with wheat grass seeds closely together (not all sprout, and they're meant to be tightly packed).

We sprayed each with water and then topped with a layer of paper towels. Then we sprayed the paper towels to keep them moist for the seeds. Twice a day we sprayed the towels to keep moisture on the grass and sure enough, after 5-6 days they sprout enough to push those towels off.

I've heard that mold can grow while in the paper towel phase, and I've also heard you can spray with a bit of vodka to get rid of it, but it wasn't needed for my batch. You only need 8-9 days to get to the first picture. We let our sprout a little too long, so learn from our mistake! We were also able to use our favors for other purposes!