Cheryl Entry #13

19th December 2018

On 15th December, our group decided to meet up and go to Gardener's Day Out to see what kind of plants are being sold in the market. As expected, succulents were the most common plants being sold there with a few vendors selling herbs, air plants and indoor house plants.

We asked around for the contacts of several vendors to see if we could broaden our supplier options for succulents, but it seemed like most of them do not do bulk orders and are just regular hobbyists who do not have large amounts of stock. There were also other vendors selling materials such as soil, fertilizers, figurines and pots. We had leftover plants from our previous events, so we wanted to find a way to sell off these plants. For all the past events where we had direct competitors selling succulents, I felt that selling them off as it is won't make us different from others.

We came across a vendor selling pots of different designs, and they had drainage holes. The pots were going as low as $5, which makes it our first option for clearing off our stock. Cat designs have been popular among our customers and we got the vendor's name card to see if we could get bulk purchases for it.

Our second option was using a special soil called nelsol soil to make succulent products like these. I approached the vendor and asked her how the soil works, and we realized that this soil acts similarly like plasticine. By adding water to the soil, it will become sticky and after awhile it hardens. To water the succulent, customers only have to spray water at the soil area. We bought two packets of it to try it out.

A day after this event, the pot vendor came back to us and told us that he did not have enough cat pots leftover, while the other designs were not as nice. Since we have not tried out the nelsol soil yet and tested its surviability, we decided to throw out a third option to clear our stocks- hand painting pots. We bought terracotta pots and painted on them to clear our leftover plants.

All of us made pots of different designs according to our skill levels (clearly) and I just stuck to simpler designs so that it minimizes the chances of messing up. It could be generally classified into 3 categories- classic paintings, cartoons, and food. I really loved the pineapple!

I wanted to make a Christmas themed one, so I painted a Santa pot. We cheated using markers instead of painting the whole thing using acrylic, because it's practically impossible to make a straight line using paint. Unless you're Cleo.

We chose the plants carefully to suit each pot and it is soooo satisfying to see the end result

The next day, we met up at Ram's place to do touching up of the terrariums that we had from previous events as well as making another batch of new terrariums. Something I noticed with each terrarium making session is that everyone gets much faster in coming up with designs, and increasingly creative in doing so. Jiaxin even brought glitter this time round, so we could play around with more colours and mediums.

With these, we are all set for the City Square event!

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