Cheap and Easy to Find Fiddle Leaf Fig Trees

We likely all know about and love the fiddle leaf fig tree - it's a gorgeous plant. In the past few years though, they've been so hard to find and very expensive. I found one a couple years ago in the flower district that was a good six feet tall, but was priced at $250! Ouch.

If you're looking to add one of these lovely trees to your houseplant collection, IKEA sells mini plants (about two feet tall) for around the $14 mark (I wrote about those here). They don't come potted though (but it's easy to use one of their pretty terra cotta pots that I love so much - they weather beautifully). Home Depot and Lowes both recently starting selling fiddle leaf figs on a wider scale (it was sort of urban legend for a few years, but this year I've seen them in New York, New Jersey, Arizona and California, so I think it's safe to say they're available in most states). This little three+ footer was only $20 and it came in a pretty little pot probably worth $15 on its own.

I bought a five footer for only $30 for my bedroom.

Getting it home safely without spilling the soil everywhere in my car was the only tricky part. I found putting it the front seat worked best.

It's a good thing the price went down so much on these trees beacause they can be a little finicky (read: very easy to kill). They need lots of sunlight, but it can't be too harsh, and just the right amount of water (which seems to be about a cup per foot of tree, once a week?).

If you find a good spot for your tree and it seems to be thriving, try not to move it - or even rotate the plant. Often their leaves grow in a way to maximize sunlight absorption, so moving or turning the plant can really throw the plant for a loop.

I water my plants just once a week - every Friday evening. I used to actually put it on my calendar, but it's become a habit now and I don't have to remind myself. My thumb is no where near green (see this post from earlier this year!), but I did myself a favor and started looking up how much water and sunlight plants need to thrive, and suddenly I wasn't killing everything! (I did accidentally neglect that Bougainvillea tree in our mudroom though and it's toast now - bummer. Maybe I'll just get another fig tree?)

Also, check out this cool planter I found and spray painted for our bedroom.

I loved the Greek key pattern and thought it would be pretty in a crisp white.

I just used a spray primer that I had on hand and no top coat (I know - such a rebel). Don't forget to spray the first few inches of the inside lip.

Pretty right? It's made of clay and it weighs a million pounds, but it will last forever and it was only about $25 at Home Depot.

Do you have any fiddle leaf fig tree care tips? Have you seen them in your local hardware stores? Or were you one of the suckers that spent $250 on a tree a few years ago, like I so desperately wanted to? :)

Trimming Boxwoods and Progress on the Back Deck

When last we left off with back deck, it looked like this. (Yeah, we lived with that astroturf for the past eight months. Yikes.) This post has a wider shot of the roughly 7x20' space. It's small, but there's plenty of room for a round table and chairs and a grill. So with the warmer weather enticing me with promises of barbeques in my near future, and my new shop-vac giving me the necessary boost of courage, I pulled that nasty astroturf up, scraped up the flaky glue and loosened concrete with a planing shovel and a wire bristle brush. Then in was time to vacuum.

Some of you guys had questions about shop-vacs since I mentioned mine in this post. They are very, very powerful vacuums that you can use to suck up anything - water, spilled paint, sand, sawdust, rocks - and the mess deposits into this big rolling bucket that you just dump out when you're done cleaning. But the filters are pretty basic, so I wouldn't recommend using them in your home for regular cleaning. They're almost too powerful for that. But they're amazing for messy outdoor projects. This is after literally one swipe of the shop-vac:

And here's what the floor looks like now. I scraped up as much of the glue as I could for now. We might still rent a wire brush drill bit to clean it up more, but the concrete is a little fragile, so we'll probably just skim right over everything with a fresh layer of concrete before I paint.

I also picked up some new boxwoods for the back deck recently. Two big ones for the matte black  planters I bought at Target last summer. And two smaller boxwoods for these new urns I picked up at Lowes last week. I love the chalky black finish!

I used my favorite pair of pruners to trim up the new plants. 

I rounded out the big ones and squared off the smaller ones. I'm hoping they fill out this spring so I can shape them a little more.

I love seeing the shot of green outside the doors in our living room. And I love that the green is not astroturf. :)

How to Keep Houseplants Alive?

I love having at least one plant in every room. And I usually think a room feels sort of stale if there's nothing alive in the space. But, you guys, I am killing houseplants left and right and I'm spending way too much money replacing the goners!

I know a lot of you have the greenest of green thumbs - so I'd love to ask you - What do you do to keep your houseplants alive? Water from the bottom? How? And how much? Do those glass bulb water things work? I read online once that leaves with brown edges means you're over-watering. Plant-tending is finicky business!

Terrariums at West Elm

So, just like my preserved boxwoods, I love terrariums for their easy maintenance. You don't have to do much to keep terrariums alive other than give them lots of sun and a spray of water every month or so.

I was excited when last month West Elm invited me to come and make a terrarium along with a few other NYC bloggers, led by their star designer, Shane Powers. He is a garden and plant extraordinaire (he works a lot with Martha).

We used these huge glass terrariums for potting cacti and succulents in special cactus soil mix and black sand.

That was one of Shane's tricks that I loved - using layers of colored sand to cover the potting soil. Look how pretty the layers look here:

It was such a fun night, chatting with blog/industry friends while getting our hands dirty. I loved sitting next to Mat Sanders and getting the scoop about the new Domino. Did you hear there is a special issue coming to news stands April 17? Mat is the new Market Editor and from what I could coerce out of him it sounds like they have a lot of great things in store for us Domino fans. :)

Do you have any exciting weekend plans? Michael gets home tomorrow (thank heaven above)! I missed that guy.

xx

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