When searching for the right combination of flowers and plants to fill out garden beds around a home, often finding the right planters and garden features are what pull the entire aesthetic together.

Many gardeners enjoy adding their own personal touch to their garden and there’s no better way to do so than with custom, homemade concrete-style planters. Joan Lewis of Moses Lake picked up making her own concrete creations as a new hobby after retiring just a few years ago.

Lewis said she and her husband, Calvin Lewis, moved to Moses Lake about 15 years ago. Joan Lewis said she soon started watching YouTube videos on concrete creations and began making her own.

“I make mushrooms and all kinds of stuff: fish, dogs, anything anybody wants that I can make,” Lewis said.

While she put up a greenhouse about a year and a half ago in hopes of starting up her own gardening ventures, Lewis said her new concrete-crafting hobby soon consumed most of her free time.

Lewis sells her works through her small business, Concrete Yard Art by JOAN, and has a Facebook page where potential customers can reach out. She said she has made a variety of different shapes and sizes of planters, in addition to her other garden fixtures.

Lewis said she makes concrete planters by pouring concrete into a mold or larger container and putting something heavy and a little smaller inside to form the walls of the planter. She said she uses Pam cooking spray on both containers to keep the concrete from sticking too much. She also said she wears thick gloves and a face mask while working with any concrete mix.

In addition to concrete planters, she crafts hypertufa material-based items. The material has a strong hold similar to concrete and includes a blend of peat moss, vermiculite or perlite and concrete mix.

The hypertufa fixtures are much lighter than the concrete planters, Lewis said. She also said her gardening friends who have gotten planters from her said the hypertufa planters helped their plants and flowers grow a little faster.

Making the hypertufa mix involves a little bit more work than the concrete planters, so Lewis said she takes advantage when she whips up a mixture, crafting a variety of different kinds and sizes.

The hypertufa planters have to be stored to cure longer than the concrete planters, too, with the process taking even longer when the temperatures are lower in the winter. Lewis said she stores her concrete fixtures outdoors to let them “cure.” The hypertufa planter boxes she stores inside her shed.

It can take anywhere from half an hour for some of the smaller concrete planters to solidify, while others take a while longer, with the temperature playing a factor in that process.

Molds work well for forming the planters and some other projects, like bird baths, but Lewis said she forms plenty of her creations with her hands from scratch.

“I make some stuff, like butterflies, where I just throw cement on the table and form it and let it cure,” Lewis said. “I do make some stuff myself without the molds.”

She has a variety of other creations, including hose holders, bee baths, butterfly baths and a variety of animal statutes. Her handcrafted mushrooms, ranging in size from around two inches to almost 40, have been among the more popular items with customers.

Lewis said she is still learning and fine-tuning her process and has learned quite a bit in the last year and a half. She’s working on a couple of larger projects, including a horse and a penguin figure she is putting the final touches on.