Cilantro seedling protected from chilly fall nights by a wine bottle cloche.

…and a friend with a bottle cutter!

I saw this beautiful photo once of a perfect garden, with twenty perfect green-tinged, bubble-glass, and bell-shaped cloches lined up in a perfectly straight row shielding bright green lettuce seedlings from the elements.

We don’t roll that way here.

Our Heaven on Earth- Home is a little more “low-budge” these days. It would be nice, don’t get me wrong, but seriously:
1. I can’t even find one of those dang, cool cloches around these parts.
2. They’re expensive, times twenty.
3. And, where does one store twenty perfect, highly breakable largeish items that DON’T NEST?

A few weeks ago I saw that Mother Nature had gifted me some late-fall cilantro babies that I needed to shelter from frost, ASAP. I no sooner had this thought to make wine bottle cloches when I bumped into a friend, Stacy. She literally whipped out these wine bottle glasses (the bottom part of a bottle cutting project) and said “Look what I just made!” So my big problem of where in the heck I was going to find a bottle cutter was solved immediately. Call it “Bottle Cutting KARMA” I guess.

Her bottle cutter isn’t fancy. It’s the K-Tel Bottle Cutter from the 1970’s, a la “As-Seen-on-TV”, but it does the job. Together, Stacy, my girls and I made glasses AND cloches one afternoon (more on the glasses in the future).

So, my cloches aren’t perfect, and my “row” of cilantro is more like a random self-seeded “patch” but I didn’t go into debt protecting my star guacamole ingredient.

Cheers to good wine, good friends, and our hard-working Mother Nature!

Stacy showing Teddy how to use her bottle cutter. It really is EASY!

(Check E-Bay for bottle cutters if you’re interested. They’re cheap!)