Creating a Terrarium ( Another I need to garden in January idea!)

Every year about this time, I long for summer. Last year I went out and bought four flowering plants to brighten up the window-sill, a cyclamen, a shamrock, a kalanchoe and one other which I don't remember because it died.

This year I tried something different: I thought lets have fun with terrariums! My mother had one when I was a child and I remember being fascinated by it. This year, my best friend made one for me, and it piqued the interest of the kids. Both of them wanted to build their own, (…and anything that holds interest on these long, long winter days is a plus!)

So we headed to the garden store and bought several tiny plants including ferns, ivy, baby's tears, cyclamens and even a miniature Norfolk pine. We were going to have fun with terrariums!

It was an easy trip and I let the kids pick out whatever they liked best. I think terrariums must be gaining popularity because our garden store had a whole selection of miniature plants and glass containers to choose from. 

 

Burdened down with our purchases we went home to find suitable jars, and we came up with five really cool ones.

We made two terrariums in glass containers, one in an old fish bowl and another in a storage cylinder with a pretty lid. We had enough plants left over to fill up an old planter from last year's pansies. 

There is nothing like bright green plants and the smell of moist dirt to lighten the mood.  I was a mom hero!  I recommend that you try to have fun with terrariums, too!   (It occupied us for a good two hours and the results were beautiful!

There does need to be a little advance planning, though.  Since the average temperature has hovered below freezing for weeks we had to pull in a bag of potting soil from the garage, and wait a day for it to thaw out before we could set to work.

My husband keeps tropical fish and needs activated charcoal for some reason, so I snagged some of that and used that in the bottom of all our containers, although pebbles would work just as well.

For the bottom layer of soil, I mixed in a bit more activated charcoal, topped that with more potting soil and let the kids put the plants they chose in place. I think they ended up with about four tiny plants in each one. 

I couldn't find the moss I wanted to cover the exposed soil between the plants, mostly because I didn't look that hard, so I let the kids drop in rocks from their collections to their terrariums. Water and voila! A mostly care-free mini ecosystem! 

You could stop here, but if you really want to have fun with terrariums there is one more step, but it is a bit advanced: Prehistoric Tableau Terrariums!

You may already have dinosaur figurines scattered about your house, just waiting to be set into the lush ferns of your terrarium. I was just so lucky. I believe some sharks, guinea pigs and a small herd of cattle also made it into the three-year-old's terrarium. Perhaps yours is more a resting place for fairies. I won't judge, I promise.

So tomorrow or the next day when it is still too cold to play outside in the dirt, stay inside and have fun with terrariums instead.

These are left over plants that became more of a dish garden and the one below is one I made in an old fish tank that leaks and I've turned into more of a fairy garden.  The "tree" is actually a piece of a very weathered dead tree stump that has been hanging around in the yard forever.

(This post is compliments of my daughter and 2 of my grandchildren.)   Thanks one and all and thank you, too, for reading my blog.