Digigirl's Garden

There is a great local nursery in Richmond, Texas called The Enchanted Forest. It is such a relaxing place to visit, filled with beautifully designed mini garden settings to inspire you. During a recent visit there, I discovered their “Fairy Garden.”

Isn’t it cute? After seeing it, I got inspired to make one of my own and started researching all kinds of itty bitty plants. I looked at a bunch online, but ultimately I ended up just going back to Enchanted Forest, buying some stuff there and plunging in!

I needed to do mine in a container because I don’t have a good permanent place to put a fairy garden, currently. After looking around for a while, I decided to do a tiered thing with multiple pots, as I couldn’t find a single, large pot that was the right size and shape within my budget.

I also decided to use a bird house as my fairy house. After all, a fairy has wings too, right? Makes perfect sense for a fairy to shack up in a bird house. So, after collecting all my goodies, my first step was to just set everything into the pots to figure out what would go where.

Once I got that figured out, I put the plants in, added the house and some rock paths and a couple of other accessories. Here are the final pots:

Here it is all together:

And here’s what I learned:

• It’s VERY easy to go overboard and want to buy a whole bunch of plants.
• Things that look tiny at the nursery look big when you put them in your fairy garden
• Make sure you water everything in BEFORE you put in your little rock pathways and such, otherwise dirt runs all over your pretty little pathways:

• And you will immediately want to make another one!

Everyone says Fall is a great time for planting, but all the articles talk about Fall as if it happens in September. Well, perhaps that’s true for the rest of the world, but here on the Gulf Coast, at least temperature wise, Fall didn’t really get here until late October. Even now that it’s mid-November, it’s still almost Summer-like. Yesterday it was over 80 degrees when I was working in the yard.

So, anyway, I’m hoping that because I’m just getting started doing my Fall gardening that I’m not too late. Hopefully, a major freeze won’t come sweeping through in a week or two to kill all my new plants before they get established.

I haven’t even gotten very much done so far. I have a long way to go before I can call myself a real gardener – I’m such a wimp! I work for an hour and I’m hot, tired and sweaty. Wah!

All I’ve done so far is replace the plants under my front yard tree. I had originally put some coleus there and they looked good for a while, but a while back we had a really windy day – and they just blew right over! Apparently, they were never able to root very well in the shallow holes I was able to make between the tree roots. So, I pulled all of those out and put in some cute little pansies – white and purple. Hopefully they will be able to do a little better, at least until Spring when I can do some more work.

Is that a word? Well, if not, it should be. If you’re like me, most of the time you just don’t think about the mountains of trash that you produce. But every now and then, you do – and then you feel really guilty. So, for a while, you make sure to recycle your plastic grocery bags, or go out and buy reusable totes for the grocery store or something along that line. Eventually, you move on to other things and you drift back into your old bad habits.

And so, the mountains of trash remain. I don’t have an answer. But I did find this entertaining article, just by accident, on that topic. He doesn’t offer the answers either, just gives you some things to think about.

The moral of the story at the end? Just try to do what you can. Don’t ruin your life over it, but pick up some trash now and then. Maybe wash out your zip lock bags and reuse them a few times. Do what you can and go on.

Check it out: – Biodegradable Don’t Mean Shit