Fairy gardening has become a popular trend. Many parents are finding that they can get their kids excited about gardening by creating these mystical little fairy gardens. You can go to craft stores or garden centers and spend a fortune on cute little fairy garden accessories or, if you’re a thrifty mama like me, you can peruse dollar stores, thrift stores and rummage sales for suitable and unique fairy garden accents.
My daughter and I found some Christmas village houses at a local thrift store that inspired us to create lighted container fairy gardens. We made one for indoor use only with artificial plants and another for outdoor use with live plants.
Continue reading to learn how we made these cute fairy villages for next to nothing. With inexpensive materials and a little imagination, you too can create fairy gardens like no others. Your only limitation is your creativity.
Gathering Your Materials
Here’s what you’ll need to get started (And remember, this is only a guideline as to how we made ours. You can always change it up to fit your own particular needs or items on hand):
- Two matching plastic pots or containers (we used dollar store waste baskets)
- Potting soil or mulch for filler (our indoor one contains mulch only, the outdoor one has potting soil for the live plants)
- Strong scissors or pruners
- Hot glue gun and glue sticks
- Green felt
- Craft moss
- Small stones
- Miniature houses
- A small string of 20-30 indoor/outdoor craft lights
- 1-inch blue ribbon
- Blue curling ribbon
- Blue glass pebbles
- Bobby pins
- Heat gun (optional)
- Live or artificial plants
- Any other little accents you find that you’d like to add – For instance, we put a little swan figurine in our indoor one and little die-cast people in the outdoor one. We came across these items at thrift stores.
Preparing Your Fairy Village Containers
One of your two containers will be used as an actual pot, while the other will be cut into quarters for the inner tiers. Decide which you want to use for the main pot and, if necessary, poke drainage holes in the bottom. Then, with strong pruners or scissors, cut out a wavy V-shape down the side of the main pot, leaving the bottom of the “V” about 2-4 inches up from the bottom of the pot. Cut this so that it looks like a natural crack in the pot. – This is where the heat gun comes in handy. I took a heat gun and lightly ran it over the cut edges so they would be smooth, not sharp. Take care not to melt the plastic too much.
-placead-Now, starting with a bottomless section of the cut pot, place it in the main pot to create a crescent shaped space in front of the V-shaped cut on the main pot. This will be your first tier, so it should be about an inch or two higher than the bottom of the “V” cut. You may have to trim to bottom and the sides of this piece to make it fit. You’ll want enough space in the crescent shape for houses or other fairy accessories. Once this piece is cut to the desired effect, glue it to the inside of the pot. You will probably have to hold it in place until the glue hardens.
Attach your next tier the same way, again leaving space for houses or other fairy garden accessories. I found it was best to use the sections of pot with the bottoms still intact for the upper tiers so soil or mulch won’t fall through the bottom. Once your tiers are in place, you can fill them with potting soil or mulch. Fill the lowest tier so the soil sits about ½ to one inch below the bottom of the V-shaped “crack.” Fill the rest of the tiers to about ¼ or ½ inch below their edge.
Now comes the tricky part, the lights. Starting with the bottom level, decide where you want the houses, a glass pebble pond, etc. Using bobby pins, pin the lights down under houses and ponds. Run the lights up the tier walls where waterfalls will be and glue blue ribbon over them. Then, on the next tier, repeat the process of pinning lights where they’ll go under houses or other fairy garden features. To make the ponds, we basically just glued a bunch of blue glass pebbles over the lights. Then we added shiny blue curling ribbon to the waterfall to make it look like rushing water.
The last step is adding live or fake plants, small stones, moss or whatever else you’d like to use to hide light cords and make it look like a fairy village. Here’s the finished product with lighting on at night and without lights during the day.
Have fun and be creative!
