Up-cycled hanging basket

The Captain is forever calling me his "squirrel" because I can hardly ever throw anything away that "I may have a use for in the future".  I did a bit of swimming pool maintenance now that summer is upon us and part of that was replacing the weir basket. Knowing that there will be a use for it in the near future, I kept the old one (of course!!). This weekend, enjoying glorious weather, I did a spot of gardening when I had this brilliant idea! Hanging basket! I can make a hanging basket with the discarded weir basket. A lot of scrubbing later to get rid of the chlorine residue, and voila!

Of course, if we had the E-clear water treatment system for our pool, I needn't have bothered to scrub at all, but I wanted to be sure to get rid of the chemicals. Now that I've seen how well it works, I might just pop into the hardware store for a few more of these baskets.

Happy day!

Green graffiti

I saw pictures of Green Graffiti for the first time on the Facebook page of Du Cote de chez Vous and loved it soo much, I had to find out more about it. I found  lovely images and recipes here, here and here.

image source

image source

In the meantime I had made my own and I'm anxious to see it grow into lush, green moss. Here are some photo's of what I did....

 Freshly harvested moss is the best

 Most of the soil rinsed off....

 Not very appealing, but it's not for drinking anyway...

 Moss goo, ready to be painted....

Painted on the wall of our shed

I'm adding some corn syrup to the remainder of the paint to see if it will be thicker and easier to paint with. The painted "wall" is South facing (in the Southern hemisphere) which is ideal for the moss to grow. For now we are very curious to see what happens over the next few weeks. 

Watch this space!!