succulents suck

So I had this post ready to go, but the project ended up being a fail a month later, so I'm hesitant to show it. However, since I have since remedied the fail with a herculean effort (good luck), I'm going to share it anyway. Consider it a DIY fail or a how-not-to-plant-succulents. Tomorrow I'll show you my project reborn.

Remember when my sister M visited and we bought these beautiful succulents?


Man they're so lush and lovely here. While we were at it, we bought some rectangular glass jars from Michaels, like these. I thought, with a layer of rocks me and M collected, they would look lovely.

The issue I came across was that the dirt would fall down onto the rocks and make a big ol' mess. If I had smaller pebbles to put on top of the bigger rocks, this would work, but I only had these whopper stones. Instead, I wet a bit of paper towel (bear with me here) and layered it between the rocks and dirt. Weird? Yeah. But a solution none the less.


The succulents went to live on my desk with my retro lamp ($10 from Home Depot). Here it is in better lighting and sans insta filters:


Not bad, right? you can see the paper towel line, but I really didn't feel like it took away from the visual at all.

The issue came when I started to water them. Turns out drainage is VERY IMPORTANT PEOPLE. I like this tutorial for how to drill holes in glass, but sadly, I didn't consult this blog when I planted. I ended up with a swamp of water and algae-like growth, it was terrible. I can't even show you a picture of how bad these things got, but it was nasty, they were completely shriveled up and dead.

OR WERE THEY?

Come back tomorrow to see how I turned things around. I'm not at this level yet, but I'm getting there.