A garden craft gets a workout

Voila! Hypertufa has arrived in my garden. Actually it's been hanging around for a couple weeks, but I've been busy.

Last month, I got together with an old friend to experiment with hypertufa at her place. She has a spacious backyard where messes can be made unobtrusively. I brought over some cheap plastic containers to use as a planter-type mold and, as I was unable to find some cheap plastic balls, I used her husband's old soccer balls for the spheres I had long wanted to make.


I won't give the recipe and exact directions here. They are everywhere. I will say my inspiration for making spheres came from Frances/Faire Garden. So, without going into boring detail, we mixed a bunch of stuff together in a wheelbarrow. We also sprayed Pam into the molds after laboriously cutting little circles out of the old soccer balls (this ought to have been an omen of things to come). We filled all the molds and then had some wine and dinner.


While the plastic molds came easily away after the requisite couple days, the soccer ball skins held onto their filling for some time, until finally, the guy working on our kitchen took pity and offered to get the leather off with his special tools.

And there you have it. Strange prehistoric spheres and a perfectly good planter.