Blue Fox Garden: Percolating…

The idea of a shallow metal dish planted with succulents and mounted atop a pole has been working its way around inside my head for a several years now. I think the first time I saw such a thing was from the Big Red Sun in Austin, TX. I can picture many examples but this is the only one I can find to share with you…

Installations done by Big Red Sun tend to be quite large and thus quite expensive…meaning not something I could ever hope to own. I’ve saved this example from a tour of DIG Gardens in Santa Cruz, CA, by J Peterson Garden Design as something more achievable…

And when I visited Dragonfly Farms Nursery during the Seattle Garden Bloggers Fling in 2011 and discovered these planted plough discs I thought I’d finally discovered a way to bring this design into my garden.

Of course I had no idea how hard it would be to find plough discs, nearly impossible!

However I’m happy to say the idea never died and when my friend Bridget and I stopped at Linton Feed & Seed en-route to Cistus Nursery last January…

And I saw these galvanized tops for bird feeders…

I knew I’d finally found a way to make the idea an affordable reality…

And really since my garden heavy on shiny metal and light on rusty bits it’s all the better to have held off until I discovered a way to make this concept uniquely mine…

The base is a galvanized fence post which Andrew cut into pre-measured lengths for me.

I wanted the disc and bottom post to remain unattached in order to remove the top easily for maintenance, however metal on metal wasn’t the most secure connection so I cut a length of clear rubber tubing…

And ran it around the top of the post (after pounding it into the ground) which helped to grip the disc.

So far so good, they’ve withstood the test of hard rain and strong wind…and I am very happy with how they turned out. The plants are all winter hardy here and having a big drainage hole and hollow base should allow for rain to drain away freely.