Diving into the Gene Pool (Home)

North Carolina decided to make Earth Day a gross, rainy, and chilly day so no playing outside for me. 

Instead I decided to follow through on my random plan to make a terrarium!

It didn’t turn out anything like I had planned but overall i’m pretty happy with the end result. I would like to make buy a desert terrarium similar to the one in my earlier post at some point. The Walmart garden center was lacking in it’s selection of desert foliage and by lacking I mean they had none. 

So here goes my little Sunday afternoon D.I.Y. terrarium project. My only goal was to make it NOT look like a middle school science fair project. The verdict is still out on whether I succeeded or not.  

Base layer of rocks. I didn’t buy enough so I had to improvise a little bit. 

I have a random collection of rocks from my various travels that have been sitting on my bookshelf so they got repurposed. I don’t remember where I picked up most of them but included are some petrified wood/rocks and some small pieces of the Grand Canyon from my cross country trips.  

I went out in the wood behind our place and found some moss which they say to put as a layer between the rocks and soil. This plan backfired as it had a lot of NC red mud in it and just got all turned up when I tried to bury the plants.

I ultimately scratched the moss idea and just did rocks and soil. This is also around the time where I almost threw in the towel (literally).

Here ya go…the end result!

The orange/red thing up front is some lichen I found outside when I was hunting for moss. It is apparently called British Soldiers because it looks like the uniforms the soldiers wore during the revolutionary war. Pretty cool!  

The plants I included:

Dwarf Celosia - the one with the fuzzy maroon center

Fern of unknown variety - on the far right

Dusty Miller - the white/pale green thing in the back

I was really hoping the pretty blue glass/rocks would be more prevalent but they should serve their purpose (drainage).  

Here to hoping I can keep this little sucker alive for more than 2 weeks!

An article on the importance of switching to reusable grocery bags caught my attention while I was scanning the news during my lunch hour.  

I constantly struggle with this one because it doesn’t seem like retailers are trying to help make the transition any easier. I have been carrying around reusable totes off and on for about 7-8 years now. When my parents moved to Switzerland in 2003 we got turned onto the idea of using reusable grocery bags. In Europe most stores charge you a small fee for plastic bags. Although the fee is fairly negligible (5-10 cents) they strongly encourage the use of reusable bags and frown upon people using the plastic bags that they charge for.  

This was one of my new years resolutions that I of course didn’t write down but rather just made a mental note to become better about.  

• I ask for no bag if I am only purchasing one or two small things (particularly gas stations, retailers, etc.)
• I pull out a few of my handy envirosax that I keep stashed in my purse and have them on the ready for grocery shopping. Most of the time the cashier at Walmart gives me a look like “seriously, you are holding up the line” but I push past that.  
• I offer to bag the groceries myself and just start tossing things in, breaking all of the rules as far as what things are technically supposed to be packed together.  
• I used to keep a bunch of those $.99 cloth bags in my trunk but I NEVER seemed to remember to actually bring them INTO the store with me. Keeping the little rolled up bags in my purse ensures that I almost always have them on hand.  
• I am slowly starting to integrate these bags into mall and other retail shopping.