Wildflower Lawn

Do you know what lawns are for? They're for rich people to show off how much land they have and don't need. 

Well, that's not much good for our house. We're environmentalists. Aside from growing our own food, we want to use our land for growing plants for insects. So, way back in March, The Artivist and I started work on turning our front lawn into a wildflower meadow. 

We dug it up. Not completely, we just wanted to remove some of the grass and dandelion roots to make room for our new flowers to put down their own roots. 

We had these Beebombs that we'd been given for Christmas, so we scattered some about, along with some other seeds and we waited. Over the next few weeks, we saw a few pieces of bee bomb taken away by crows. We didn't see much sign of any flowers. 

We tried some more Beebombs, this time germinating them in water and then placing the seedlings carefully on the lawn. Still after a few weeks they hadn't taken. 

We learned from our friend The Allotmenter that many wildflowers don't do too well in nutrient rich soil. There's a flower called yellow rattle that drains soil of nutrients and it's useful to plant alongside other wildflowers for this reason. There are yellow rattle seeds in the bee bombs, so we hoped that if they came through, the other flowers would follow. 

Eventually, in early June, we saw a few yellow rattle flowers pop up on our lawn. 

And, sure enough, we soon started to see some other flowers coming through too. Vetch, buttercups, chamomile.

Later we saw nasturtiums, poppies and cornflowers.

It's not quite the full wildflower meadow I'd had in mind... yet. But it's coming along nicely, the bees and butterflies seem pretty keen on it already and I think next spring we can expect a nice array of flowers to bloom all of their own accord. 

I Melted a Record

This is Lucius. I've had him since he was a tiny little pet plant, but now he's starting to look like a proper cactus.

Lucius needs a new pot. He's not outgrown this one (obviously) but it is made of paper and it seems that the pin holes that I made for draining when I water him get clogged up too easily.
I've wanted to play with melting vinyl records for a while, so thought this would be a pretty good excuse.

I have read that it is possible to do this with a hairdryer. Possible, but time-consuming. Well, I did this with a hairdryer and it took about 20 minutes (although I suppose it is a small record).

I chose to use a hairdryer because I thought I might have more control over the way it moulds. Most of the bowls I've seen online look quite shallow, and I want to make more of a pot than a bowl, meaning I need the edges of it to be quite steep. 

At first I wasn't sure I did have much more control over it, really. With a hairdryer, you can only heat one part at a time; when you move to another area, the first part starts to cool down, and it lifts back up in the process. I imagine this wouldn't happen if the whole thing were equally pliable.

I soon learned that once one area was supple enough, I only needed to hold that part in place for about 10 seconds while it cooled a little for it hold its shape. Then I would turn the hairdryer back on and move to another spot.

So I kept going round and round, stopping every minute or so to hold it in position for a few seconds, until I had a shape I was happy with. It did get quite hot; at some points it was hurting my fingers too much but I found a drinks can on the floor (yes, I'm an untidy person) and used that to hold the record down. When I'd finished, I took it off its cup, and it looked like this:

And here is Lucius in his new home.