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.