My Hobbit Container Garden!

You may remember from my spring to-do list that I have been planning to make a miniature Hobbit home as part of my container garden this year.  Well, I'm happy to say that I've done so!  I finished it up a couple weekends ago, and finally have time to share pictures with you.

It all began with me finding this door on clearance at a craft store a couple years ago.  I bought it on a whim, thinking it would be fun to surprise my kids by sticking it against the base of one of our trees and seeing how long it would take them to find it.

But then I found white picket fencing on clearance last fall and knew I wanted to do a little container garden that looked like a Hobbit home instead.  Toward the end of April, I bought some Scotch moss and other little ground cover plants and put them in my pot, forming a hill with the moss for the door to set into.

But this didn't really look like a Hobbit home.  They don't just have doors, they have walls and windows and so on!

So I got crafty.  I used popsicle sticks and wood glue to make two walls, one for either side of the door, and I glued some to the door too so it would stick down into the ground and have some wall coming up above the door.

Here it is while it dries.  I added some plastic corner joints in hopes that they would keep the walls together a little more, which sort of worked.

Then I spread spackle over all the walls, minus the bits that would be stuck into the dirt.  I tried to make it look as much like plaster as I could.  This was totally my own idea, and I wasn't sure if the spackle would resist rainstorms or not, but I had this old tube that was mostly dried up, so figured I'd just use it up and see what happened.

Every Hobbit home should have a window by the door, right?  I added one.

While the spackle was wet, I stuck a big round, pearly button into one wall, and then set some cute beads in around it like decorative bricks.

Button and beads were both something I just happened to have around the house, by the way.  Not something I bought specifically for this.  I glued some broken toothpick pieces across the button to hide the button holes and to look like window crosspieces.

I didn't take photos of this part, but I painted the whole thing a happy, buttery yellow -- much less bright than it looks in the pictures here.  I used paint that's meant for terra cotta pots and other outdoor crafting projects -- left over from when my kids and I painted a bunch of planters a couple years ago.

I used another wooden toothpick and one of the wooden pickets from the fence (I had lots left over) to make this little signpost showing the way to Bree.  I wrote "Bree" on it with a fine-tipped Sharpie.  (Bree is a town in Lord of the Rings where Hobbits and Men both live, so I decided my little Hobbit home here must be near Bree, but not quite in it.)

I bought this little wheelbarrow this spring, and the tiny rocks I used for the pathway.  Stuck some of the rocks in the wheelbarrow so it looks like my Hobbit is working on a new project.

And here it is!  My miniature Hobbit home!  I'll share another picture later this spring when the moss "grass" and other things have grown in a bit more.

I'm happy to say that my spackle "plaster" has survived several heavy rainstorms and looks just fine!