The days might be cloudy and rainy, but one thing is undeniable: Spring has arrived. And the small taste o sunny weather brings out the gardener in me. It’s beautiful to watch something grow day after day, taking care of it, and then harvest the hard work. For the longest time, I wanted to create a small garden with vegetables and herbs to feed my little dwarf bunny. I can’t always find diversity for her in the supermarket and grow it myself would solve the problem.

I started this project back in April when everything was in lockdown. I would preferably build a vegetable patch out of wood, but with shops only half working I wasn’t going to go out exclusively to buy wood. I had to work with what I had around the house. And in one of the attics clear-out, I went through all the architecture models I did during Uni. One of them was a massive block of expanded polystyrene foam (aka styrofoam) perfect to cut out a hole in the middle to create a container.

Before putting in any soil, I knew I had to make this container somewhat permeable to avoid rotting roots. The vegetable patch is going to sit outside in my balcony, so it will be exposed to rainy days, and the box needs to have a good permeable system. I started by punching holes on the bottom using a hand embroidery needle, the largest one I own.

The next thing was to do a layer of gravel to help drain the soil even more. I didn’t have enough gravel to create an even layer, so I scattered as much as I could. Maybe the gravel isn’t doing much, but in the next days, I noticed the water was coming out from the bottom, which is a good sign. To top it off, a layer of soil evenly spread, of which I also didn’t have as much as I wanted. After the first harvest, I might add more soil to have as much space as possible for the carrots to grow. These first ones will probably be tiny!

Time to plant! I bought lettuce, carrots, radishes, and cucumbers seeds and tried to follow the instruction the package, especially for spacing each vegetable. After a few days, the radishes started to sprout, and after a month, I already harvested the first ones. Although, the lettuces were destroyed by my cat. He was loving digging and laying down on top of everything, and the lettuces were too fragile to survive. Now I’ve scattered on top of the soil some lemon peels since cats are supposed to not like citrus smells, and so far it’s working.

This project didn’t occupy me enough, I wanted to add something creative to the mix. Plant markers can be so cute, but not ofter I have the opportunity to craft some. I grabbed “inspiration” from Animal Crossing, which means I wanted to make something cute but ended in a very different art style.

I started by doing a simple rectangular sign with chamfered corners, the stake centred and ending in a sharp point. I used 3mm balsa wood, but the thickest the better. The measures are 6cm by 4cm, and the stake is 4cm long by 1cm wide. After cutting one out, I used it as a template for the others.

After all the markers that I needed cutout, it was time to sketch the vegetables. I tried keeping a similar drawing style on all of them using an elongated drop shape and other rounded shapes. The radish is the cutest. I had the best time painting it, and I still had to go over it a few time as I was still trying to find the right shade of red and green. The acrylic colours looked great, but only when it was dried did it show the end colour. Balsa wood tends to absorb a little bit of the paint, and even though the wood shade is so light, it still darkens the acrylic paint.

After everything painted and dried, I topped with two coats of white glue to prevent the paint from dissolving since acrylic is a water-based paint. Now, I wished that before painting I had sanded the wood because the glue only made it even more clear the roughness of the surface. I didn’t care much for it at the time, but it would feel a look nicer.

Out of all the markers I made, the lettuce one is the worst. Just pretend I painted crispy and fresh lettuce instead of that cabbage-lettuce hybrid it turned out. In my defence, lettuce is very hard to draw when you are trying to simplify it. I might even try to redraw it since my cat ended up killing them, and I’ll have to plant them again.

This is by far the perfect project I wanted to show off, but it was simple (somewhat) quick, and I enjoy the overall process and creativity aspect. While I was painting, it was the best hour of the day. I was completely oblivious of the world outside my craft room. So either if it’s painting wood markers, a colouring book, painting book edges, doing paper crafts or pompons, creativity can be the best friend to occupy the extra time at home.