Make your own Kokedama hanging garden

From installing indoor plants to making your own terrariums, there are plenty of ways to bring greenery into your home. And right now, everyone’s loving Kokedama.

A Japanese bonsai gardening technique, Kokedama essentially means ‘moss ball’ and you can use them to create hanging gardens inside your home. All you’ll need are some cheap essentials easily found at Bunnings or your local hardware store, and you have yourself the perfect rainy day activity.

You’ll need:

• Peat moss
• Bonsai Soil
• Sphagnum moss
• A small potted fern (like this one or this one)
• Twine
• Scissors
• 1-2 litres of water (top up as needed)

Step 1

Soak two bowls of sphagnum moss in water, and set aside.

Step 2

Mix a bowl of peat moss with a bowl of bonsai soil and slowly add water until the mixture adheres a ball. You want the consistency to be moist but not wet, or sloppy. You’ll want your first moss ball to be around the size of a grapefruit or a large orange, at a minimum — you can make it bigger if you’d like.

Step 3

Remove the fern from its pot. Work the soil from the roots, just as much as you comfortably remove — you don’t need to tear apart the root system itself.

Step 4

Take your peat moss ball and crack it a little in the centre. Add the fern so the roots sit in the middle and mould the ball around the root system, with the leaves sticking out.

Step 5

Wrap the sphagnum moss you’ve been soaking around the ball with the fern now inside it. This can be messy but the goal is to keep wrapping moss so it sticks around the entire surface of the ball.

Step 6

Wrap twine in haphazard patterns around the ball. You don’t want to cover the entire thing but wrap it enough so that the moss will hold comfortably to the ball. Cut the string and tie it off.

Step 7

Cut 3 pieces of string to equal length and tie them off to three separate points on the ball, then finally tie them together at the top. Now you have a Kokedama ready to hang anywhere in your home.

Repeat the process, making different shaped balls with different ferns for a truly spectacular hanging garden. For ongoing care of your Kokedama, you can just spritz with a spray bottle once every couple of days.

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Image source: Garden Answer