Got some time on your hands to do a little easy creative pot-making for the garden? While trying to no slip back into the 1970s, during this season’s lull in garden activities I did some garden crafting.
Not macrame (at least not yet), but faux stone planters called hypertufa. Tufa is porous but heavy limestone often carved into planting troughs; home-made hypertufa looks and works like the real thing.
I was inspired by Faith Estes from Winston County, who made me a beautiful garden sculpture by spreading a mudpie mix of Portland cement, sand, and peat moss over the back of a big elephant ear leaf. Once it dried, she painted and sealed it and gifted it to become a subtle but prominent feature in one of my small flower beds.
By the way, Portland cement was first named for how it resembles the pale limestone quarried from the windswept cliffs of England’s Isle of Portland, used in famous structures such as St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Sorta like Epsom salt being named after the village where it was first identified.
Back to making the cement leaf. I won’t get into much detail here because there is a lot of how-to online (including felderrushing.blog, with photos), but basically Faith settled on mixing two parts Portland cement (big box store), one part builders’ sand, and one-part crumbled peat moss, and gradually mixing in water until it was like moist dough. She pressed the big leaf face down over a low mound of sand, then covered the leaf with the cement mix, about an inch thick near the center and tapered to be thinner near the leaf edge.
After a day or so of drying and turning it over and letting it dry another day or so, she sanded the edges, brushed on acrylic paint and finished with concrete sealer. It turned out super realistic looking and has held up in my garden for over eight years now.
A couple of years ago I did something similar to make several inexpensive, medium-large birdbaths out of regular ready-mix concrete and water, spread over a flattened mound of sand covered with plastic food wrap to keep the sand from sticking to the drying concrete. You can see one of them in the herb garden at the Ag Museum in Jackson.
But my latest is the hypertufa pots. I grow quite a few hardy cacti and succulents, especially sedums and sempervivums (what Northerners called “hens and chicks”), and have long wished I could both afford and manhandle heavy, real stone troughs. So, I made some that look realistic, hold up well through all weather, and are light enough for this old guy to move around.
I made them using upside-down plastic containers covered in non-stick food wrap as my molds, and a thick mud of equal parts Portland cement, perlite, and peat moss, adding a little water at a time till it got where I could make a ball out of it before it got sloppy wet. I went a step farther and added a handful of concrete reinforcing fibers, which come in small bags in the cement section of the big box stores.
After packing it around the mold (note: wear rubber gloves, cement can burn hands) and poking drainage holes in the bottom, I let it cure for two days before easing it off the mold and letting it dry some more. Now I have very realistic faux stone pots that are moveable and hold up outside all year.
Love the creative, frugal “made it myself” feeling. Might try a leaf next.
