Garden accessories on the cheap

There's something about elevating an urn or a planter that gives that piece distinction in the garden. Like putting a piece on stage.

I've drooled over many lovely urns and pedestals in catalogs, over the years. What I'll usually do is find the planter/pot/urn that I like at a place like Home Depot, on clearance online, or if I'm lucky, at a yard sale, but make-do on the pedestals.

The rear planter in the above photo gets it's elevation from none other than an 8 X 16 concrete block, that we already had in the stack of leftover construction materials. I topped the concrete block with a ledge stone, leftover from some stonework on the front of the house a few years ago.

Here's an urn that I saw in a pricey catalog many years ago. They had it paired with a very nice pedestal. They wanted about $50 for the pedestal, alone. I found the urn, on clearance at another online catalog, minus the pedestal. I checked around with our extra supplies, and found that these small square pavers fit the base of the urn perfectly. I placed a stack of 2 pavers on top of some larger pavers, for a pedestal effect -- all from our stack of leftover construction materials.

Here's another, smaller urn, from Home Depot. While not a perfect fit, this 8 X 8 concrete block makes a good enough pedestal for this urn and it's mate, the two which are flanking the steps down into the sunken garden.

Mid-July, can hardly believe it but we went blackberry picking last week!

Wild blackberries are usually an August thing in our neck of the woods. But a week ago Saturday, my daughters and I took a very long walk around the area and found many of the blackberries were beginning to ripen.

As both daughters like to add fresh blackberries to yogurt for breakfast, I suggested we meet up at the bus stop one evening and do some picking. I brought containers for each of us, and in a half an hour, we picked 2 and a half quarts!

We used some of those fresh berries with dinner that night, topped with honey-vanilla yogurt. And the next morning, my 2 daughters did indeed add blackberries to their breakfast yogurt. Since they were already washed and drained, I froze the remaining berries in ziploc bags, to use in pies, cobblers, smoothies, syrups and jam, sometime in the future.

My daughters and I will be meeting up at their bus stop in Tuesday evening, this week, to pick another 3 or 4 quarts of blackberries. This early blackberry season is a real blessing to us. Our raspberries and blueberries are about done for the year, and there are very few early apples this year. These blackberries are our fresh fruit for the next couple of weeks (that's when the early pears will be ready).