Terrarium

Have you ever been to a paint night?  You know, one of those events where you get together, paint a picture, drink some wine, and come home with something you've painted?  I didn't want to go to a paint night, but I wanted to get

together with some friends.  We found an event that centered around plants, and decided to go.  We made a little terrarium, filled with succulents.  Considering my dismal failure with the cactus garden in Coke Cans, I'm wondering how long this will last before the cacti just give up and wither away.  If you look at the picture on the right, you can see just how sad my succulents looked after just a few weeks.  I blame myself.  I'm a terrible plant mother.  Other people manage to make things like this thrive.  Not me.

The actual making of the terrariums was a lot of fun. We began with colored sand, rocks and a large glass bowl. Add the rocks in at the bottom of the glass jar, and then layer in the sand and potting soil.  It ends up looking really pretty!  I think I ended up with more potting soil than I was supposed to.  Most people had a nice, neat little puddle of potting soil in the middle of their sand, and then they put the succulents in the middle of the soil, so that only the sand showed up on the outside of the bowl.   Not me.  Boy howdy, I love making a mess, and I didn't have any tools to make the sand go in nice and neat, so I just poured in the sand directly from the big zip top bags.  No fancy schmancy gorgeous, even layers of sand nicely leveled out and even for this girl.  Nope, I've got sand that reflects me - just all over the place and in uneven, kind of messy layers.  What can I say?  It's who I am!

The raw materials.

The view from the top.  It's kind of cute, isn't it? 

I think my next project is going to be to get a big, closed top lidded jar and try and plant a terrarium with some kind of warm, jungle like plants.  I think I need a big pickle jar.  You know, the kind you used to find at delicatessens that held something like 5 gallons of pickles.  I wonder where I can find one of those?  I wonder how long it would be before I managed to kill off all of those plants, too?  Like I said, I am a terrible plant mother.  I'm hoping that because they would have a lid on the jar, I wouldn't have to actually keep track of watering them.