Garden of freestyle delights - Painted stone garden markers

Why you need garden markers

Optimistic gardeners might think they will remember where they planted such and such seeds, or which containers contain seeds. Hah.  Experience quickly teaches that it is easy easy easy to forget what you buried in the ground and where. Just ask any squirrel.  To help your memory, why not make some weather-proof garden markers?

How to make your own garden markers using rocks and acrylic paint

I had some luscious acrylic gold paint from a previous project where I was painting picture frames.  But nothing says gardens can't use a bit of bling! So I got out the paint and a pen, since I didn't have any paintbrushes at the time.

At first I tried to use the tip of the pen dipped in the acrylic to 'write' on the rocks by dragging the tip of the pen across the surface. This worked poorly on the uneven rock surface, the words were legible but the letter were uneven and blobby.  Then I thought about some painted rock mandala images I'd seen and thought about trying to using dots to make the letters. That worked out muuuuuch better, and also led to some other fun dot-based designs.  

Fair warning, this activity is addictive and soothing!

At the end of it I had some painted rocks with words for labeling the various seeds I had acquired to date: spinach, cilantro, and basil, along with some other freeform designs I could use for decoration while there was mostly bare dirt in the pots.

Conclusion

The easiest part is that you can just set the rock inside whatever pot you just planted up. No worries about it falling over or blowing away in a stiff breeze. Here is the garden label I made for some Thai basil seeds I got on sale because they were from last year.  Hope they germinate! Happy freestyling!

Update - the basil seeds took a long time to sprout, but they did eventually make it.

New Home for a Dracena marginata

The Dracena genus of plants includes a variety of beautiful and hardy specimens, very popular for indoor houseplants.  Buy one, help clean your air!  My Dracena is an $8 grocery store purchase that has survived for 3 years on a south-facing windowsill and looks just fine, it might be Dracena marginata since the leaves have red edging.  The plant had been in the same pot for over 2 years, and it had grown steadily during that time, so I unpotted it and found that there was almost no soil left around the roots.  Time to repot!  Unfortunately the hardware store near me does not sell low-cost large flexible plastic plant pots.  But they do sell large expensive-y ceramic pots....no thanks.  Good thing I had a freestyle find to help get the job done.

The plastic on these green plant pots is oddly brittle and the top had split in a few places (maybe why someone discarded them during the summer).  I reinforced the top with a loop of duct tape all around the outside so that any handling wouldn't cause the whole thing to break apart.  Functional, but not very pretty.

 

  On the top of the pot in places where it was split I added tape over the top like in the photo below.

As you can see in the photo above and below I added a layer of rocks over the soil, hopefully this will help prevent fungus gnats from taking up residence in the dirt.  I paid for the decorative rocks. It was a $7 moment of weakness.

To make the whole package a little prettier I put the planter into a cachepot - a fancy term for a ceramic planter without holes in the bottom.  This helps to obscure the duct-tape repairs since the planter sits a few inches below the edge of the cachepot.  This cachepot was one I had on hand, originally purchased at Ikea for $20.

The final repotted Dracena looks lovely in its new home.  I'm glad I found a way to repair and reuse the brittle green plastic planters.

Happy gardening and freestyling!