"Well, I'm a cement mixer, a churning urn of burning funk"

Blame it all on Pinterest. I went a little cement crazy the other day. I've been wanting some new garden art to funk up my flower beds, and I wasn't about to resort to buying it - especially when this is typical of the offerings at the local garden centers:

I see enough of that action on the streets of Casper on any given summer Saturday, so I don't need it in my garden. Side note: before I did the image search for the biker garden gnome that I had seen in the Sutherlands ad,  I had no idea that biker gnomes were such a big thing. I have missed out on a major trend and the possibility for a theme garden. How about these little beauties:

Pretty sure I saw this couple rolling through town last summer before the Sturgis Rally.

Let me further expand your options with another genre of garden gnomes: "rude garden gnomes." If you were so inclined, you could search for this on Google and be presented with pages of possibilities. Luckily for you, I've done the dirty work and narrowed it down to a few priceless picks. 

I might actually need a couple of these to keep my dogs out of my strawberries.

for your pole beans? 

Some gardeners swear by planting according to phases of the moon, so...

But I digress...a lot. Back to the cement. I pinned several projects involving cement, so on a recent day too hot to do anything strenuous in my yard, I decided to give one a try, and one thing led to another. 

I started out with a cement garden ball. I saw this idea and had been saving the globe light from an outdated ceiling fan to use as the mold. This site has great instructions: DIY Concrete Garden Globes I especially liked how the author presented a few different recipes, each with a different texture, and how the site included photos of globes created with each recipe. I used the recipe using potting soil because that's what I had on hand. I wasn't about to use the peat moss recipe because there is no such thing as buying a little peat moss. They come in a huge brick that, once opened, expands like one of those little magic pellets your kids throw into the bathtub to create a big sponge toy.  

before - Goodbye early 90's decor

The directions were easy to follow. I mixed the cement and potting soil in a bucket. A great free source of buckets for projects like these is your local supermarket's bakery. They get frosting in these big plastic buckets that they are happy to give away. My husband had a stockpile because he uses them to store grain for brewing beer. The directions said equal parts of the cement and potting soil. It's important to have fancy professional measuring tools. I used 5 red Solo cups of each and added one Solo cup of water. That was about right to achieve the consistency of cake batter.

Red Solo cup. I fill you up. Let's...make some concrete. Hush, I had to say that. 

 I sprayed the inside of the globe with cooking spray as directed; there was a little grime and maybe some mold inside it from where it had sat outside for a few weeks, but I was feeling too lazy to wash and dry the inside. I just hoped for the best. I found that the volume decreased a LOT once I added water, so I kept making and adding batches to the globe. I worried a little that the color of the mix would vary a lot as I kept adding layers, but oh well. It might look like a parfait, and...wait for it...errbody loves a parfait! As directed, I filled the globe up to the top of the round part, leaving off the lip, so that the final product would be mostly round. Then I left it to cure for three days. It cracked a bit right away, maybe from expansion, but luckily it stayed intact.

The last step was to crack the glass off. I put the whole project in a plastic garbage bags, got out a wood mallet, donned my work gloves and safety glasses (ok, they were actually just sunglasses) and got cracking. The glass stuck more than I had expected - probably my earlier laziness coming back to bite me - but it did come off.

 Et voila! A cement bowling ball worthy of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble! 

I had some cement left over, so the fun continued. I decided to make a cement rhubarb leaf birdbathy thingy that I had also seen on Pinterest. I've been wanting to use rhubarb and cement for years. About 17 years ago when we added a sidewalk behind a master bedroom addition, I wanted to ask the concrete guys to press rhubarb leaves into the freshly poured sidewalk, but I chickened out. I figured they would think I was a freak. I still wish I had gone for it. Anyhow, the idea has been stuck in my mind all that time like something stuck in...concrete. So, the cement was there, and the rhubarb leaves were there, and another project was born. The big leaves were a little ratty with holes from either bugs or hail, so I picked a smaller leaf. Even though I remembered that the directions I had seen earlier said to mound up sand to drape the leaf over to help it be a cupped shape rather than flat, I wanted to make it right then and I didn't have sand. I just mounded up some dirt in a spot where I had ripped up some unwanted mint. I put the leaf face down with the ribbed part up then patted the concrete onto the leaf and kind of shaped it with my hands (rubber gloves on, of course, since cement is caustic) to follow the contours of the leaf.  Then I just left it alone for a while.  

Real bloggers probably try to keep their iPhones out of the shot :/

doesn't look like much, does it?

I didn't look up the directions on any of this because, really, what was I out if it didn't work? Leftover cement and a leaf. Big whoop. And failure can be fun! Turns out it wasn't much of a fail. 

first finished version

This batch of cement resulted in a smooth, beautiful leaf, but it turns out it wasn't very strong. It later snapped in half.   

I added a bit more potting soil to the mix for the next few I tried so that the fiber would add strength. My goal was to make enough leaves of varying size so that I could use them in the waterfall part of my goldfish pond, so I went a little hog wild. I ran out of space in the dirt, so I mounded up some gravel in another part of the yard. Again, what the heck. Cheap supplies. Turns out the gravel wasn't such a good idea because the large leaf had a few holes in it and the gravel stuck into the project some. No big deal. It would give it some texture, right? I do think sand covered with plastic wrap would have resulted in a better finished project. My leaves' edges are really rough because they picked up the texture of the dirt. When all else fails, read directions before you go off making things all willy-nilly. That's what I'm here for, though, to provide you with a model of what NOT to do. I'm helpful like that. 

The hardest part of the project was digging the rhubarb ribs out of the cement once it was hardened. Some peeled right out - so satisfying...like peeling a scab (don't judge me) - but others required more work. I ended up using an orange stick for cuticles as a tool. That worked well, and I scrubbed the rest out with a dish brush and some dish soap. 

Here are the final results for one leaf in the waterfall. Purty! 

I went back later and routed the water under the leaves because my husband said the cement caused the water to foam a little and get murky. I didn't want to kill the fish. Dang it. I was looking forward to my new leaves getting covered in green algae and being organic works of awesomeness. Oh well, at least they cover the black plastic that showed too much and heated the water. Here's what it looks like now. Not what I had planned, but still good. Still good. 

All right, now for the big finale. Cue jazz hands. No actually, cue cement hands. This is definitely a Pinterest project that you'll either love or hate. The jury's still out for me.

Creepy or cool? You decide.

I sprayed cooking spray into a pair of thin latex gloves from my husband's shop then filled em up.  The hardest part was "milking" cement down into the fingers. I think it might work to use a pin to poke little air holes in the end of each finger so that there wouldn't be air pockets in each finger. I'm not happy with that little dent on the one finger. It's bad enough that they're disembodied ghostly white hands; they don't need to be mutant disembodied ghostly white hands.

These pink gloves will probably be my next victim for draft 2.

 If I do a second draft of this (and I probably will) I will use more substantial Playtex gloves because the hands turned out a little wonky even though I tried my best to shape them to look realistic. I'll also follow the directions more closely and use little rocks to separate the fingers a bit more and prop up the fingers to cup the hands better as it showed in the directions. I just used dirt clods because, as I am wont to do, I was just winging it. Better preparation would have paid off; when I peeled off the gloves, I broke off a finger because there wasn't enough space between to let it peel off smoothly. It was fun peeling off the latex - reminded me of the glue skin we'd always make in elementary school. You know how you'd paint Elmer's glue onto your skin then peel it off once it dried? You didn't do that? You missed out. You were probably in the corner eating paste. Here's the original project page with directions so easy a former paste eater can follow them:  Garden Hands

I've been thinking that maybe I should make a cement clawed hand to bury so that it would look like that last scene from Carrie when she reaches up from the grave. Ha! Or maybe I should make one flipping the bird. There's clearly a market for that with the rude biker gnome crowd. 

The Bell Tolls for Thee

I never planted the purple flowers in my yard; they infiltrated the flower beds on the west side of my yard by crawling stealthily under the fence and its concrete footer and growing in the horrid red rock that made up most of that side of the yard when we moved into our house. I noticed that they didn’t seem to care that they had to grow on top of heavy black plastic in the tiniest bits of soil that had blown into the rock. They spread happily through the rock with their hanging purple bell-shaped flowers.  “Those are kind of pretty,” I thought. Love leads so often to weakness and letting down our guard, and that is exactly what happened in this case. I was Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction, and the bellflower was Glenn Close.  It wasn’t long before its green spikes spread. They infiltrated from the red rock area, across a garden path and into one of my larger perennial beds. Soon, I noticed that once the flowers quit blooming, the remaining foliage tended to turn yellow then develop white powdered mildew. Unacceptable behavior. The bellflower was no longer a flower; it was a weed.  The battle was on. I couldn’t allow these invaders to conduct their own version of biological warfare in that bed.

the enemy returns

My first plan of attack was to pull them. I spent hours yanking them out - very satisfying because they seemed easy to pull. I filled at least one wheelbarrow with their limp green carcasses before standing back to admire my work. My satisfaction was short-lived because unfortunately the little heart-shaped leaves emerged again.

Fine, I thought, I’ll just go deeper. I had to get the roots. That’s when I fell victim to a classic blunder. No, I didn’t get involved in a land war in Asia nor did I go in against a Sicilian when death was on the line. Worse. I broke out my little garden tiller and attempted to chop them into bits. “Mwahahahaha! Die! Die! Die!” I muttered under the roar of the tiller. I had underestimated the power of my enemy. The next summer they were back...in greater force. I clearly needed to arm myself with more information. (I know; that probably should have been my first step, but alas...) I learned that my enemies were called "creeping bellflowers" and had a huge taproot with side-shooting rhizomes. My classic blunder was that I had unknowingly used my tiller to help the enemy multiply. Each root was like the Hydra of Greek mythology: cut off one head and two spring up in its place. It was time for hand to hand combat.

the alien life form breaking through plastic

I broke out my digging fork and turned the soil one chunk at a time. I pulled apart each clod by hand, peeling out the root. If necessary, I’d take another stab to go even deeper. Usually, the deeper dig yielded still more roots. Some of them were huge. This one was a mutant albino carrot powerful enough to break through thick landscaping plastic like the creature tearing out of John Hurt's chest in Alien. Was it tedious? Yes. Was it satisfying? YES. I added more and more to the mass grave of roots that I placed on black plastic. The plastic hadn’t been effective as a mulch, but, I reasoned with glee, its heat-absorbing capabilities would help it bake the roots to a faster death. 

I'm not a cold-blooded plant killer; I'm just hell-bent on protecting my more well-behaved flowers like the Johnson's Blue geranium behind the mass grave. I'm sure I'll be forced to continue preventative strikes so that they don't return. The area I cleaned out before still has baby leaves popping up here and there, but I'm controlling them with pulling and chemical warfare (using a sponge brush to paint on a toxic cocktail of castile soap and Roundup...more on that later in a post the battle of the bindweed...)

the killing fields