Grow your own ... wine

Making your own wine can be an involved, messy affair. 

Just ask Lucy.

But one Dutch designer turns wine-making into a work of art — something stylish enough to display in your home. 

Sabine Marcelis' wine-making kit comes with a pair of glass vessels, a brass stand, tubing, testing and corking supplies.

It's like a chemistry set for adults.

Pots for every occasion

There are some pots that I've owned for years.

I buy them out of necessity — when I've picked up a plant and don't have anything on hand that I can recycle at the moment, many of those are just blah pots because I'm in a hurry to get the plant potted and situated in its place on my patio.

I buy them because I just like the pot and don't have a particular plant tagged to call it home.
 


Sometimes I buy the container not knowing exactly what I'm going to use it for, plants or otherwise.
 


That's how it was with this Hungarian baby bath.

I originally thought I would put it in my garden with my birdhouses and bottle trees. Maybe I would fill it with ice and drinks when I had company since it has a convenient drain for the ice that melts.


But I've ended up using it as a seasonal plant container.
 
It sits on my patio and right now — I have these great ferns in it.



Once it gets cold, I'll have to move the ferns inside, but the bathtub will stay.
 
In October, I'll put some yellow or white mums out to welcome the trick-or-treaters.
 
In the winter, I fill it with pansies.
 
If you use big container plants, you can just drop them right in and lift them right out when you're ready for something different.
 


If I get tired of changing the plants out, I still have the option to ditch the plants and fill it with ice and drinks  or —
 

cover it and use it as a serving table or —


just sit it in the garden with the bird houses and bottle trees. 
 


"He hits from both sides of the plate," Yogi Berra once said. "He’s amphibious."
 


That's the way some containers are — amphibious.

An arcade in the garden

Gardening can sometimes feel like a game. 

It takes skill, effort and a time commitment — watching a plant grow, knowing that you've successfully balanced all of nature's variables, feels like a victory. Kind of like hitting the 3x multiplier on a pinball machine. 

Remember pinball? 

Gottlieb made the King Kool pinball
machine in the 1970s.

Back in a time before each child had a handheld game system, cellphone or iPad in his hand, kids used to pack arcades to spend some quality time with giant light-up machines, playing against their friends or  just against the machine to get the highest score. 

My favorite game was King Kool. The psychedelic Medieval theme was, well, cool. I could spend hours in a dark arcade, watching the flippers fling the ball across the backglass, the board lighting up as my score soared higher. A game of skill! the board exclaimed. Skill, indeed. 

These days, my skills are more natural. I've traded my hours inside for some quality time outdoors, but I can still spend hours in a dark place, since many of my favorite plants grow best in the shade. 

Nowadays, there's a new king of cool in my life — the king kong coleus. 

King kong coleus likes the shade,
similar to the cool environment of an arcade. 

The Kong rose coleus prefers shade or morning sun that lasts only a few hours and is not as hot as the afternoon sun. In time, they can grow big enough to provide their own shade. 

Now that I'm older, I get more enjoyment from the real life game of gardening. Seeing the results of my hard work in a colorful, healthy garden is a much better reward than bragging rights. And  now I'm old enough to drink wine to celebrate my victories.