When my mom was here over Christmas, she was telling me that she had found a recipe online to make her own planters. I was immediately intrigued since terracotta is pretty pricey and there is still the fear of it cracking, not to mention how heavy it is…and the plastic versions just aren’t even remotely the same.
Although she couldn’t find her own recipe anymore, she was flipping through an old Souther Living issue and found an article about hypertufa planters…which also happens to be online. How to from SouthernLiving.com. They unfortunately use fiberglass for a strengthener but this can easily be omitted since most other recipes I glanced at did not. We’ve had some “fun” around here recently with fiberglass already and I don’t think either of us is interested in going back down that path. The PO (previous owner) of our farm left behind several hundred meters of fiberglass string although we didn’t really realize what it was at the time. We used it to stake out our garden and I’m pretty sure we’ll be going to great lengths to never have to touch that stuff again. Our fingers were hurting for days afterwards.
There are many other how to articles online, such as the one at BackyardGardener.com (which doesn’t use fiberglass), or you can get really creative by doing your own stepping stones, garden statues or whatever else you can think of. Efil Doog, a gardening site out of New Zealand has some great information about decorative uses.
Oh yeah, you can make tons of things with hypertufa. I love the stuff. I see you tried using fibreglass to strengthen the hypertufa pots that’s something I haven’t tried that yet. I seen people using fibremesh which works great. I know to strengthem the pots or anything we’ve tried we’ve used chicken wire which works good to. The only thing with chicken wire is that it’s hard to work with so next time we are going with fibremesh to add more durability and strength from cracking.
I love hypertufa and definitely something people should try, easy to do and you can make so many things like pots for gardening. Something everyone will enjoy.
Love you blog, good job.
Sincerely,
Jamie Boyle
Hypertufa Gardener
Hi Jamie,
Thanks for stopping by! We actually never got around to trying out the hypertufa containers but maybe I finally can this year! It will be a year with lots of focus on our garden for a change anyway!
Glad you enjoy the blog and hope I can continue to keep it interesting 😉
Tiffany