Grandma's Enchanted Fairy Garden: February 2016

February has long been considered the most romantic time of the year thanks to Valentine's Day. For this month's Fairy Garden Class, I ran with this popular theme focusing on the colors red and white. I began with a large terra-cotta pot, placing about an inch or two of small rocks to allow drainage before filling in the rest with potting mix. Be sure not to fill to the rim of the pot; leave an inch or two. This will insure that water and soil doesn't spill out and it also helps to give your plants support.

Once you have chosen the plants you want to use, be sure to lay them out in the position you envision prior to taking them out of their containers. This helps you to design your garden and get the spacing correct and allow you take a step back and make changes without having to irritate the plant too much. Once you're happy with your arrangement, it's time to transplant them into their new home. Here I used Alyssum for the white and some sort of red shade plant (both from Home Depot).

For this garden, I've decided to use a mushroom house as the center focus point. I have placed a small terra-cotta saucer upside down to act as a firm foundation and to keep my decorative house from getting soil on it. I've also decided to cover the soil with moss. Other than visual appeal, moss can help to contain moisture in the soil. Moss can be helpful in hiding things you don't want people to see, like the saucer platform, and moss also gives it a more woodsy feel. Now that your pot is full of flowers and ground cover, it's time to add decorations.

As mentioned before, I've added the mushroom house (which incorporates the red and white theme) and surrounded it with moss to hide the foundation.

Next (pictured below), I added small features like a white picket fence that I picked up at Hobby Lobby and two leaves that I literally picked up from the ground (they are dried Poinsettia leaves). I saw that they curled to make the shape of a heart and felt they would be a nice, natural feature to this garden.

After taking a few pieces out of storage and a trip to the Dollar Store, I was ready to fill in the arrangement. What started as one terra-cotta pot expanded outward. The bottom level was created by placing two small pots upside down and placing a flat board on top which you can't see thanks to the cover of the moss that blends nicely with the greenery I've placed around it.