How to Make Broken Pot Fairy Garden

A few years ago we visited a local auction full of all sorts of interesting bits and pieces; one lot I came across had masses of fabulous terracotta pots and planters and being someone who prefers second hand to ‘brand new’, when it came to this tatty, shabby auction lot I simply couldn’t pass it up. Spending just £10 on a vast collection of pots and planters in a varied range of sizes once home, we went through what we had purchased and it wasn’t long until we saw that along with most of the usable pots, there were of course a few breakages. Knowing that a project would spring to mind some time in the future, I put the breakages aside for a later date.

This weekend the ‘later date’ arrived; I had a project in mind and went to my pile of various broken things behind my greenhouse and pulled out one of the broken terracotta pots, along with the bits that had fallen away from it and set about creating a broken pot Fairy Garden with my husband and Birdie.

It was one of those projects we started together and I could see Birdie was a little unsure of what the finished article would look like; whilst a very creative and visual child, she couldn’t get past the fact that we had a nasty old broken pot and that we were going to create something really beautiful and magical for her fairy friends.

While my husband broke up the broken bits of terracotta into smaller pieces, Birdie started digging some soil to fill the pot, once we had set the levels suddenly the engagement began as she could see the shape of a garden begin and soon she was helping set the levels and adding broken bits of clay for steps. Once the general layout was set up, we collected moss and some plants we had planted some time ago and transplanted them into the fairy garden. Stones and shells were collected from some loose shingle we had and used to decorate, along with sticks and foliage from the silver birch to create a weaved fence.

What you will need:

Broken Pot/Planter
Soil
Moss, Sticks, stones, Plants for decoration
Essential item: Bags of imagination
If you don’t have a broken pot or planter, you can always buy one and carefully break it up by giving it a good soak in water and then breaking it up yourself. Keep an eye out for little ones when breaking the pot up though as clay as a material does tend to fly off in all directions.

I always think it is worth remembering when creating crafts for little ones, that you don’t have to go out and buy ‘crafting kits’, so often we pull things out the recycling pile and set to work creating things with items we already have in our home.

A broken clay flower pot doesn’t have to be discarded, it can be squirrelled away as ours were and resurrected in the future as a tiny garden to spark the imagination of both younger and older children.

The Woodland Wife - How to Make Broken Pot Fairy Garden