This will be an ongoing post as it relates to our latest topiary project. Topiary is a technique where a three-dimensional frame is stuffed with material, such as sphagnum moss, and molded to a desired shape. The moss absorbs water and retains it, which feeds the vine you plant inside. This allows the topiary to hold its form. Animal shapes are a popular design, which you will see in this post.
I found this cute little turtle topiary on Amazon while I was shopping for something else garden related and I couldn't resist. It is not huge, measuring 10" in length by 5" in width and 4-1/2" in height and covered in sphagnum moss. I thought it best to start with a smaller sized frame. If I have good luck, then maybe I will progress to larger frames in the future. Time will tell. Let's get started.
I bought two pots of Blue Star Creeper for this project. I'm thinking now that I will only use one for the turtle. The other I might just plant in a pot and watch it grow. If I have a need, I can always transplant it at later date.
The first thing we need to do is to soak the topiary in water for about 1 minute. I am using a black plastic dish pan for this step. It works perfectly. I have found that these little dish pans have many uses around the house. I keep several of them for different projects, but we will talk about that in another post.
After about a minute, remove the topiary from the water. Now we add the vine. I was originally going to use Creeping Jenny. That's how we came up with "Jenny" as her name. But I was in the garden center at Lowe's and saw the Blue Star Creeper and decided to go with that. I like the small leaves on the Blue Star Creeper. I think they will work better for this project. On a medium-sized topiary, I would use Creeping Jenny or even Creeping Fig Ficus. For large topiaries, I would go with English Ivy. As I said earlier, if this works, I may try some larger topiaries in the future. But, for today, we are going with Blue Star Creeper.
To get the vine in place, just make a small opening in the moss. Generally, instructions for this type of project will say to make a small hole using a "dibble" or a screw driver (I've seen both of those suggestions), but I just used my thumb. Once the moss has been soaked in water, it is pliable enough so that you really do not need any special tool.
Remove the plant from the pot it came in and, if there is a small root ball, remove that and insert that through the hole you made in the moss. The form is filled with sphagnum moss, so there is support for the root ball inside the wire form.
I ended up going with Creeping Fig Ficus, which I did not think would work when I first started this project, but that turned out not to be the case. That is how we learn. Through trial and error. I only needed one vine, as you see here. It was too early for these to be in the garden center when I started this project back in February, so I ordered this from Etsy. There was actually a seller on Etsy who had these, so I placed the order and, in a few days, it showed up.
The Creeping Fig Ficus has an actual "root ball" that can be transplanted from the pot to the form.
To hold the vine tightly on the form, I used floral pins scattered here and there to hold everything in place. Then, it was off to the greenhouse and the watching game began.
It is hard to see through the vinyl in this picture, but the turtle form is on the middle shelf. I planted the Blue Star Creeper in two separate ceramic pots and they are on the left of the turtle. This was in early March. The weather was starting to warm up a little, but we were still getting some chilly nights. I kept the greenhouse zipped up most of the time during the month of March. We had some nights in the thirties. Not a hard frost (which we rarely get in Savannah), but cold. In the beginning of April the weather turned consistently warm, so I have been doing a combination of unzipping the greenhouse during the day and zipping up at night. That holds some of the heat from the day inside, which all the plants seem to like.
And here is Jenny the Turtle today. You can see that the Creeping Fig Ficus has taken quite nicely.
The leaves are strong and making their way around the form just as expected.
By the end of the summer, we should have a fully defined turtle topiary. I am going to need to use some additional floral pins to help define the shape, but that is a simple task.
As for the rest of the greenhouse, on the left, in the square ceramic pots, you will see that the Blue Star Creeper which I started out with is doing very nicely. It is very happy in these pots. The "leggy" plants you see in those pots are wildflowers. The black container in the middle of the picture is also an attempt at growing wildflowers. We will see how this goes. At the bottom of the picture in the three separate containers are black elephant ears. They are pushing their way up a little more every day. And finally on the right side of the picture, is a little Money Tree (Pachira aquatica) which was on the kitchen counter, but he did not like it there. He started dropping leaves, so to the greenhouse with him.
All-in-all, a good start to spring planting. In addition to these, we have cherry tomatoes on the vine already and I started a garden we called "The Garden of Mismatched Pots". I will share that with you in upcoming posts.
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