I'm not great with house plants. OK, I'm terrible with house plants. I kill them so quickly that I've pretty much given up altogether. The only success I've ever had is with a hardy little plant that my grandmother gave me, I forget the name at the moment, but I think it was the kind of thing that people work hard to kill in some places, so 'm not sure that I was keeping it alive so much as that I wasn't spraying it with pesticide, thus it did fine. I'm trying my hand at an orchid (I know, cause those aren't hard to keep going or anything) on the window of the kitchen and since the thing hasn't died yet, I've gone on a succulents. Which is probably where I should have started, but oh well. I bought several pots of succulents at Lowe's for another project I'm working on and had one left over that was sitting on my counter for a week looking lonesome. So I decided to give it a home.
A few weeks ago I stumbled onto a blog entry about pickle jar terrariums and decided to try it out, but on a much smaller scale. The idea is to fill the lid of a jar with moss and some little wild, grow in the cracks of sidewalk type plants, water it well and screw the jar on over the plants. The sealed environment keeps the moisture at a good level and the plants live happily in their little glass homes.
Since my plant was very small and I only had one, I used a baby food jar (it felt a little weird to be hanging out in the baby food section again!). I picked up some moss on a walk I took earlier this week and when I got home I put it all together. So now it's been sitting happily on my windowsill for a few days and I have to say, I think it's going to work. It's just enough green to perk up the white white windows and makes a good contrast to the grey sky that's been looming over Charlottesville for the past few days. I want to find something to do with the lid since an upside down Gerber logo isn't really my idea of pretty, but for now I'm enjoying my little tiny terrarium. Keep your fingers crossed that I don't kill what should be a happily self sustaining little world. Stranger things have happened.