More on the garden

I actually planted that garden over a month ago at the end of June. Winter not being a prime growing month the plants are slowly getting established. We had quite a wet July and now we are getting a warm August.

I remembered the name of one of the plants which is pratia white but cannot remember the other one yet.

Here are more recent photos of the garden. I have been having trouble making the furniture. The children love watering the plants and my glue from my glue gun seems water soluble so the chair back keeps falling off. Have to figure out something else so the furniture is a bit more robust.

The other day I made some figurines and inspired by the Magic Onions blog I made a swing for one of the figurines to put in the garden.

Everywhere we go the children want to collect rocks and shells, they are only allowed to pick out one or two favourites each and then we put the rest back for others. The swings is made from an interesting broken shell with wire wrapped around it and then the loop is hung over the tree. As you can see there are a few other shells dotted around the garden.

I am still streamlining my figurines. The two sitting on the chair are made from wire 10cm long and bent in half and twisted with a bead for a head. One is wrapped in a small ribbon, the other in embroidery thread. Embroidery thread is used for their hair as well. THe original instructions I found said use raffia but I wasn’t sure how that would go wet and these dolls will get wet. The figure ont he swing is a 12 cm piece of wire and I cut up a ribbon to wrap around it, which is why it looks so frayed.

So that’s the update on our garden.

Minature Garden

I was inspired by this blogFairy Gardens to create a magical minature garden with my children.

I decided to take the failed vegetable garden (something attacked the zucchini plant) and turn it into a garden for the children to play with. I followed the ideas from here HOw to make a Garden

So I headed to the local nursery and bought some “step upons”. (I will have to try and remember the name of the variety I bought) I wanted the plants to be able to put up with handling and also make the children’s hands smell nice after touching the plants. Marigolds were on sale so I put them in my basket. I could find any rolls of moss so I gave that a miss and headed home with my plants and children in tow.

Next I heaped in the soil and decided where to put my little pond and to plant the plants. I decided to keep in my mystery vegetable plant to be a “tree” for the garden. It could be a capsicum but who knows, something was eating it too. I also planted one of the marigolds to stop whatever was eating my plants to discourage them to go away. In my garden I discovered moss so I dug that up and transplanted it and tucked it in the garden. I found a few worms this way too and they were transplanted to play in our new garden.

The children had lots of fun helping me plant the plants and finding the stones to put in the garden to created the garden path. They keep collecting rocks and putting it in the garden making it more of a rock garden than a fairy garden.

We also had made some ladybugs out of egg cartons so for a little while it was our ladybug garden but the ladybugs went for too many swims in the pond and got soggy.

The pond was made out of an old lid from a fruit container.

Here you can see how much fun the kids had putting the stepping stones in

Now we just have to wait for the garden to grow.

Here’s my little fairy