Winter Foliage

I meant to write a post journaling the current state of the flower gardens this year {the flowers that are going strong, the flowers that weren't there last year ?where'd they come from?, the things I'm doing differently, etc.}, but I have something much more exciting to share. The water gardens are in! I was inspired by my trip to Thailand to put in a water garden. As you can see in that post, the water gardens in Thailand are simple, they use a small contain with a few plants, and some goldfish.

A couple of weeks ago, I placed an order for a white water lilly, water lettuce, duck weed and fairy moss from Catfish Logic. For large plants like the water lettuce and the lilly, you order the number of plants you would like, for smaller ones like the duck weed and fairy moss, you order by weight. The plants arrive wrapped in plastic with an ice pack in the box to keep everything cool. When I unpacked the box, the plants in great shape, and I was really happy with the combination ordered.

In preparation for the plants, I put my contains outside a few weeks ago, letting them fill up with water from all of these spring rains {I wanted to minimize the amount of chlorinated/treated water that I would have to add from my tap}. I had to top both containers off, so I did that with filtered water from the tap and let it sit for a few days to let some of the chlorine evaporate. I wasn't concerned about the chlorine's impact on the plants, but I was concerned about the fish I wanted to add.

I separated my plants among the two containers, the white, smaller container sits on our front porch, and the red, larger container sits on our deck. At first I was going to put the water gardens in the yard, but I realized that for maximum fun/entertainment {who's up for a wild night of watching the water garden?} that I wanted them in areas where we would hang out most often. In the photos below, the plants haven't been added to the red pot yet.


Since we had two gardens, I wanted them to be, as the Thai people say : "same same, but different". So in the white container I put duckweed and three water lettuce plants. In the red container I put three water lettuces, fairy moss, and the water lilly. Again, after adding the plants, I let the containers sit for a couple of days before adding the fish. My plan was to add about five fish to the larger container and two to the smaller one. Unfortunately, the pet store was sold of your basic run-of-the-mill goldfish! So for the moment my plan was thwarted, and I came home with just two fancy goldfish. I added them to the the red container Saturday morning, and I'm happy to report that as of Monday morning they're still alive! They seem to be happy in there, and we haven't peaked the interest on the cat yet... although, I think that the larger container is deep enough and there are plenty of hiding spaces to keep the fish free from harm. Already the fish are doing their job ~ they've cleaned up the few mosquito larvae that were wriggling around in the water.

This project is fun because creating the little water ecosystem is a big experiment for me. I'd like to keep it simple and healthy, so I'm watching everything closely and will adjust my care if I see the water getting murky or mucky.

My other weekend project? Painting the master bath! This little project doesn't really need its own post. I was just happy to put some white paint over the lavender walls. Once the paint was dry I traded the old white blind for a bamboo one, put up a hook for our hand towels, and traded out the plastic switch plates for wood. But I still can't decided what to do over the toilet? A couple of glass shelves with plants? a piece of art?