This week I found a special Delish-able Mention from my friend Debi.  As you probably know, California is having a drought right now.  We’re supposed to have a very rainy winter, but that doesn’t help our brown grass now.  Lots of California residents have taken to zero-scapes or rock gardens.  Debi’s answer to an empty water fountain in her back yard is a perfect way to showcase her creative talent and not have a huge water bill and waste water.

As you can see, this fountain was a cat haven but she’s working on a better place for her cats to hang out.  She also had overgrown grass around it and a vision to change it!

Sorry, this pic is a blurry, but you can see how the fountain fit into the backyard and once a upon a time with water…it would have been peaceful and a nice feature.

Debi started to clear the area and give eviction notices to her cats to get her project started.  She was determined to make it a planter!  Succulents would eliminate having to water it excessively and give her enough variety of plants to create movement in her design.  Her husband wasn’t quite sure he understood the project but alas went shopping to collect plants with her for the project.

From this point, she had a few ideas for the ground.  We brainstormed the possibility of creating mosaic stepping stones in water patterns.  That sounded great to both of us but then Debi started the project and quickly learned that it was too ambitious.  Sometimes you gotta know when to pull the reigns in and do something achievable so you don’t get frustrated.  She made the right choice to scrap that idea and go to plants and rocks to cover.

Here’s more of her work in progress, as the statue gets placed with plants surrounding.

The finished project is finally filled in with plants, rocks and statues.   It makes me reminisce for days of carefree water usage as the plants mimic water but I couldn’t be more proud of her staunch effort to pull this project off!  It took her about 2 weeks to devote to working on this.  (It was a few hours here and there in the two weeks , not 24 hours/day!)  She’s onto the next project and I’m sure plenty of Delish-able Mentions in the future as well.

Here’s a glimpse of another fabulous fun project on her patio.  I have no idea how she is hanging these parasols, but it must have something to do with Mary Poppins?

Congrats to Debi and if you have something to recommend to me as a Delish-able Mention, please leave me a comment below.  Thanks for reading!