I’ve always loved yard art made of cinder blocks.

These are two of my first four mosaic planters, which as close as I can figure, I made sometime in 2021 (see below). I wanted to experiment with broken pottery and other “found” tesserae, and I was happy with how they turned out.

This was April 16, 2021, the first time I had my trees trimmed by E & J Sanchez Tree Service. So we know I hadn’t started the mosaics yet, but at that point I had painted the planters pink.

In “The Stakes are High”, from October of 2021, you can see all four of them with the plant stakes “my girls”, also known as J & J, and I had made out of beads.

By April of 2024 my planters, or what you could see of them, looked like this.

In April of this year, they looked like this. I had brought those golden bearded irises from my parents’ house, several years before.

This month I decided to make some more mosaic planters. I also got some portulaca plants to put in them. If the temperature hadn’t been in triple digits for the past few weeks I may have finished them sooner. But that’s another story in itself.

I had forgotten how much fun it was to glue random pieces of broken dishes onto cinder blocks.

For something like this, it didn’t matter to me that the mosaic surfaces were not going to be in any way smooth. This type of thing is your chance to see what kind of interest you can create with texture. Just remember you’ll have to put the grout on pretty thick.

A lot of these found pieces were “found” on other mosaics I had done that had either fallen apart or somehow been broken (my gardeners are far too faithful for me to call them out here, but…anyway).

I had bought three smaller cinder blocks because the larger ones turned out to be too heavy for me to mess with at the “big box” home and garden store. However, when I wanted still more, I realized I could order them online and use their curbside pickup. That was so much easier than putting them on the cart myself and dragging them around the store, then loading them into my car. The only thing I had to do was put them in my little red wagon when I got home and pull them into the back yard.

Gradually the collection began to take shape.

This is how the first small one looked before and after grouting. At the right, although it had been grouted, I still needed to wipe off the excess grout and clean it off with vinegar and water.

Grouting is always a mess, but it’s still one of my favorite parts pf the process.

I put the small one on the end and moved the potted iris to the left.

I had to use gray grout on the last two small ones, since I had run out of the sandstone color, and so had Carlos’s store.

To me, you don’t really notice the color difference.

However, there had to be more color besides just sandstone and gray, preferably turquoise.

Yesterday I bought some marigolds at Carlos’s store, and we’ll see how they do. I thought, “I can’t go wrong with marigolds, but the marigolds could go wrong by coming with me!”

While I was there, I saw a really nice sunflower. It was much taller than what you can see in the photo, but I didn’t want the man who was walking in the aisle behind it to think I was taking a picture of him. It was $31.99, so obviously I was not going to buy it. After the “Sunny the Sunflower” fiasco, I’m not going there again. And Sunny was only $4.99. But I did buy some seeds, which, if they grow, you may read about here.

So now, the finished planters have all been set out.

I still have these two to finish, and that’s not counting the ones I still might go back and get from the “big box” store curbside pickup.

And speaking of marigolds. . .

For a bit of nostalgia, these photos, dated August of 2016, show some of my former marigolds, who have since gone the way of Sunny the Sunflower, in that same location. In the background you can see the birdbath, that in August of 2018 became “A Whimsical Mushroom”, which later became the “Stolen Whimsical Mushroom”.

I still don’t know how that happened, since it was, at least for me, before the days of doorbell cameras. But I hope whoever took it wasn’t too disappointed to see that, like so many of my DIY projects, it wasn’t even finished! And it had to have weighed a ton!