Are you thinking about creating a container garden? Here’s a great garden craft and the best way to add moss to containers.
If you’ve been following my blog for even a hot minute, you know I love to create and plant container gardens and window boxes. I love a lot of variety in one pot, yet I don’t like the look of exposed dirt. To me, it looks like vacant space that needs to be filled. That’s where moss comes in and actually adding it to your planters is not only beautiful, but also very important. Here’s why.
Garden Craft
There are lots and lots of varieties of mosses and since I’m not an Earth Scientist, I haven’t the slightest to any of their names. However, I do know that you can find moss in shady, damp places, like under a tree, beneath ground covering vines, on rocks, and even on the backside of our garage roof. Although having moss grow on a shaded roof may not be ideal to the roof itself, it certainly is ideal for my garden crafts.
So as I mentioned, I don’t like to see dirt in a container garden. This is where moss comes in. I love to add it around the plants to bring even more of that gorgeous green and texture to the containers. And, not only is adding moss an added plant feature to garden pots, it also holds a valuable job. By adding moss on the surface of dirt, it absorbs and retains water and nutrients which helps plants grow. To add to the value of moss, it is an amazing fertilizer, and this will allow your plants to flourish!
Adding Moss To Containers
I’ve had a bowl-shaped container sitting on a stump outside of my garden house that I had been wracking my brain trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to plant in there. The options ran full gamut, but what I ideally wanted was to have a moss container garden. So, that’s what I did. I added a few empty plastic plant pots to the bottom to take up some space. Then, I added dirt all the way up to the top of the pot. I used a clean putty knife to carefully remove the moss from the roof, gave it a good dunk in a bucket of clean water, then added to the surface, using the pieces of moss as a puzzle and tearing into pieces to fit in place.
Adding around plants is just as easy. I decorated my hosta containers with moss…
Filled in around a rabbit foot fern….
Covered the open area around the coleus in this concrete garden basket. The coleus will eventually spill out on both sides, leaving the moss to peek trough in some places.
Moss doesn’t need to be all on dirt, either. Terra cotta is a very porous material and moss has a very easy time attaching to terra cotta, and growing. I love to drape it over the sides to bring flow to the garden container.
The containers I have with moss, I water every three to four days, depending on the heat, and only thing I do like to do is to spritz the moss with a spray bottle of water, every day, to keep the surface moist and the color vibrant.
A very fun garden craft that is not only pretty, but also gives nutrients and protection to your plants. Perfect to do on a lazy weekend afternoon.
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