This year we made two gardens for the kids. A fairy garden for my daughter and for my son we made a barnyard / gnome garden. They can spend hours outside playing with these, rearranging the paths, the animals, making bridges and ponds. I was very pleased with the results and it was well worth the money to create these projects.
If you start out with a large planter, be sure to drill holes in the bottom for drainage if it doesn't already have them. We first started with some sort of metal tub from target, but later moved them into bigger, more heavy duty plastic planters from the gardening store.
We painted a few rocks to decorate the garden with. My daughter painted the rainbow on the smaller stone which she really enjoyed.
To keep the weight low, we filled about half to three quarters of the planter with clean, empty milk jugs or plastic soda bottles. We filled the top with dirt, smoothed the dirt out, and laid out some moss. The moss kinda sorta worked, and probably would have been fine if the dogs hadn't made it their life mission to dig up everything in the planters on a daily basis.
I found a bag of smooth glass stones that had white, green and blue colors. This worked out well for making paths, ponds and green patches. If you check around you can find a lot of items on sale. Most of ours we found for 50% off at Michaels.
I wish I had taken pictures at the beginning of Summer when the kids gardens looked the best. We made a bunch of red and white toadstool mushrooms for the gnome garden that have been misplaced, and the plants were looking better before the dogs dug them out. Oh well, lesson learned.
The gardens this year were a bit of a dud. The lettuce and some of the herbs are really the only plants that have done well. Puppies and wild animals took a toll on the garden, especially the strawberries, before we were able to put a fence and netting up around the gardens.
A crazy wind and hail storm also destroyed all of the tomato plants and broke not only a bunch of bushes and plants, but also uprooted trees in our town and made a gigantic mess. It was a hell of a storm, which we missed as we were a few towns over shopping, so we weren't able to bring any plants in to the garage last minute to protect them. I guess every year can't be a winner for gardens.
I hope you enjoyed taking a peek at our Summer projects!
