The Good Earth

A recent episode of "CBS Sunday Morning" featured a piece on terrariums. They looked really cool, and I thought to myself, "I can do that."

And so I did...



The plants are from Winston's Flowers on Route 9 in Chestnut Hill (a little more expensive, but the plants looked really healthy and I was spoiled for choice). The fishbowl, gravel, and charcoal came from PetSmart. (I had the other two containers already; one of them is a trifle bowl I never use.)

I got my directions from an article in Yankee Magazine (written by the woman featured on "CBS Sunday Morning"), but I modified them by using bright light loving succulents instead of shade loving dwarf plants. (My living room gets a lot of sunlight.) In my experience, a cool thing about putting succulents in a glass container is that you can easily monitor the moisture level of the soil, making over-watering less likely.

ETA: If you are going to do this, DON'T put river stones in your succulent terrarium. They prevented the soil from drying out (which the plants like), and the succulents started to rot! I had to pull all of the stones out and pulled out a bunch of dying pieces along with them. Hopefully I did this soon enough to stop anything else from dying, but talk about learning a lesson the hard way. Yeesh!