a garden for the fairies

There are fairies at the bottom of our garden!

They often have a dance on summer nights;

The butterflies and bees

make a lovely little breeze,

And the rabbits stand about and hold the lights.

Did you know that they could sit upon the moonbeams

And pick a little star to make a fan,

And dance away up there

in the middle of the air?

Well, they can.

~ Rose Fyleman

In an effort to attract a few fairies to our garden, we decided to make a sweet little garden just for them. We brainstormed about the kinds of things that we thought might attract fairies to our garden. We came up with mushrooms, moss, butterflies, seashells and glass pebbles.

The mushrooms were made from sculpey, then baked and painted.

We spread potting soil in the bottom of a clay saucer, the placed our fairy items carefully around the dirt. Once we situated them in the perfect places, we spread chia seeds in between the moss, shells, and glass pebbles. This is what the chia seeds looked like when we spread them after soaking overnight.

Even before the chia grew, we had quite a lovely beginning to a garden!

After the first night, we already had a few white sprouts on our chia seeds.

By the second day, we had green leaves beginning to sprout.

On the third day we had green leaves beginning to spread between our mushrooms, pebbles and shells. We decided to move our garden outside to see if the fairies might notice.

Sometime between the third and fourth day one of our butterflies flew away. (Or "maybe a fairy rode away on it!" as Finn suggested.)

Fairies come here! (sign by Philip) We're ready for your visit now. Please stay a while. Sit on our mushroom, taste our chia (we hear it's very healthy!), walk along our glass stepping stones. We hope you'll visit soon!