Fairy Garden

We finally got around to setting up our fairy garden. Back in August we bought Tess a fairy cottage. She loves fairies and she has her very own fairy living in our front tree who leaves all kinds of tokens of affections for her. Sometimes she leaves seashells, sometimes the tree hole she resides in is covered in glitter and sometimes she even leaves magical animal totems. We love our fairy, even though make-believe is a bit taboo at her montessori school, magical is just the way things are around our house. We worked this weekend on getting a mini lawn and and the landscaping basics down it. It was a great start to building our fairy house. For anyone looking to build your own fairy garden, Hobby Lobby has a great selection of inexpensive mini garden elements. We purchased the cottage from Amazon, and had the fairies figurines left over from the fairy cake/party we had for Tess when she turned 5. The pea rock, soil, and edging all came from Lowes. We are looking forward to planting some scale greenery when the weather gets a bit more predictable. Check back to see the progress on our little magical world. 

Macro Greenhouse

After 3 years the terrarium that Tess and I constructed in our earlier post had to be put to rest. The plants had gotten leggy and it was no longer the small sweet green world on my dinner table it was more like the big green monster. I transplanted all the plants outdoors into a bigger pot and since the container has just been sitting in the garage waiting for me to make another. I've been either too busy or lazy to clean it so I decided to use another vessel and make a smaller slightly less planty version of a terrarium. I had a some left over moss from an orchid repot and a great glass globe I had purchased at West Elm that had been calling out to be used. I went scouring my junk box for some cool things that might work together thinking I wanted to make something greeny and easy enough for Tess to help with. I chose some quartz crystals, miniature model figurines and a piece of pyrite that was collecting dust on Matt's shelf. The project took us about 15 minutes to put together but a good hour and a half to talk about all the items. Tess was completely fascinated by the figurines and played with them forever asking all kinds of bizzaro questions. She was also enamored by the pyrite and crystal shapes, we had a mini lesson in rock formations and even took a trip to the back yard to get additional rocks to examine. I love this age, even the smallest simplest little projects turn into opportunities for learning something new.

Harvest

The first few precious tomatoes of the season are ready for picking. About to undertake a big renovation/addition to our house this summer we planted very little this year. Since our backyard will be one big muddy construction site I debated if I should plant anything at all but decided that I couldn't miss an opportunity to teach T about growing from seed. We started the plantings indoors in February and Tess has patiently watched and watered her plants over the past few months with loving care. Elated at finally getting a chance to harvest some of her crops, she immediately picked the first tomato and went to bite right in and enjoy it straight from the vine. Also ready were sunflowers that had grown a few feet tall, which are now pride of place on our dinning room table. Construction is likely (hopefully, all fingers crossed) to begin next month and we might not get to harvest the rest of our crops but at least we got a few early tomatoes to get us in the summer mood. Fingers crossed the watermelons are ready before all the craziness starts.