Planning Containers for this summer

Callies & Coleus

Kathy was talking about a peach Thunbergia somewhere.
These do well in hanging containers or trellises...make sure the trellis is at least 6'...

Coleus & Begonia. These did better than expected together. The Coleus was dominating the pot by the end of summer, but the Begonia didn't mind. Sun until 2 pm.

Has anyone ever put gladiolas in pots?

As far as plants that like containers - most will do well if given ample space. I think there is a tendency to cram plants into less-than-ideally-sized real estate, or combine things that have differing requirements.
Other considerations: ensure excellent drainage by adding grit, and feed/water accordingly.

YES! Excellent, but they will need to be staked.
Plant med-tallish billowy things around them; the short stake/staking system will be hidden.
I love doing bulbs & the like in pots - it brings the tall ones right up to eye level.

Thanks. I am going to re-do some planters for my mom and I am writing down ideas so I know what to look for when buying seeds or plants.

Holly, if you're having a hard time deciding, it can sometimes be easier to plant one thing per pot & arrange them in a manner you/she prefer(s).
I do this with some things so i can move them around, in case they nedd more or less sun, etc... But colour is what drives me.
I find orange to be my least favourite. But I've had more fun working with it than any other colour.
The coleus offer quite a range, too, and seem to take the varying exposures well. They are considerate of their neighbours, unlike the aforementioned petunia...

If you haven't joined you should do so for a variety of reasons. One of them is Al Tapla's container gardening forum. He talks about the importance of slow and steady feeding and of watering for draining to leach out salts. This goes directly to the thread.

http://cubits.org/containergardeningwith/thread/view/1084/

He also has a place where you can ask him specific questions.

Beautiful pictures, everybody. Keep them coming. I think I'll be doing a few more containers this year and maybe I'll even try to feed on a regular schedule!

Al has posted some fantastic information on DG as well. His DG name is "Tapla", and i highly recommend reading what he has contributed in regards to containers & soil...

Oh, Tapla has his own cubit! I'll definitely have to check it out.

Thanks for the compliments, everyone! I got kind of lucky with those two (and I think my phormium died this winter.... :( ) Funny, I feel about the same about orange as Katye does, but I've really had fun playing around with it as well.

Mstish, I forgot to mention how much I liked all of your containers as well, and wow, so many! I like the way you've added hanging baskets all along the fenceline, very nice.

Julie, love your colors with the clematis, a cascade of beautiful flowers. I'd love walking up to your doorway.

Katye, your containers are gorgeous, really well done and maintained. Mine end up a bit scruffy, I don't always fertilize as I should. I am going to try your suggestion of lining the coir with landscape fabric when I redo a couple that need new coir this spring. I think that's a great idea.

I've got a container that I've had lilies in for a couple of years and thunbergia did really well climbing up their stalks one year. Made them not nearly as unattractive after they were done blooming.

These aren't in a container right now, but this is a color combination that just sort of happened. (they could be in a container, though, maybe with the silver helichrysum and I don't know what else, a sedge?) I've been wondering if it really worked or not. What does everyone think?

I like that, Sue. Helichrysum, a bit of green grass - what about the Optic Lights grass? It's dainty, but I'm having a hard time visualizing the colour. Frosted curls Sedge has a silvery tone, but goes to the beige side later. Most do. Hmmm...A deeper shade of the same lavender-blue - what about one of the purply cupheas? Dainty & typically bi-coloured. Or Callies - lots of shades there to fit the bill. I'd take this pic to a nursey to see what works - but right now there isn't much to see. Well, there's always plant catalogs, lol.
Uh oh, time to be May!

Great pictures, everyone!
Thanks!
I've got a particular interest in this subject because we're getting married in the backyard this August and I want to get a lot of pots together before then.

We have an ugly retaining wall out front that's almost as tall as I am. On the top of it I have planted white rock rose, 3 or 4 different kinds of lavender, and upright and trailing rosemary. In front of them, on the rim of the retaining wall I think I'll put about 5 cheery, yellow pots with trailing annuals: sweet potato vine, million bells, white licorice, nasturtium. That will soften the wall some.

In the back, where the ceremony will be (~100 people tightly packed in) I want to put pots with the wedding colors. Colors I want to work with: white, gold, chocolate brown, light brown, champagne and a stronger, summer color. Chocolate cosmos is all I've come up with there. Any suggestions?

The trick will be to get the overall aesthetics of the individual pots, plus the pots as a whole AND get them looking good for August.

I almost want to hire someone to do it for me because I'm feeling a little frightened...

rockems. How exciting! I'd suggest some bright orange cannas, gold calabraochia, dusty miller is actually silver, elephant ear has varieties that have chocolate leaves, variegated creeping Charlie has a silver edge to its leaves (keep it in a pot and don’t let it get into your lawn). Bacopa (white) is a good ground cover and it drapes to cover ugly pots. All of these are easy to grow and don’t take long to grow beautiful.
I got married in my garden. Don’t worry too much about having it perfect. Nature is supposed to have flaws – it gives it interest. And the bride will outshine anything growing from the ground. :-)

Hi rockems,
How exciting! There's a chocolate lysimachia that might be interesting to work with also, maybe you could have two sets of combinations and alternate them, one with the creeping charlie, and one with the lysimachia.

There are some oriental lilies that will bloom as late as august (They're the fragrant ones, too) and if you plant them this spring, they will bloom the same year. They also bloom later if they're planted in the spring. There's a lily grower in Vancouver, The Lily Garden, and she could tell you which would be the best bets. There are a lot of yellow or yellow/white lilies-and they don't take a lot of space, (except vertically) so they wouldn't even need to be the focal point, but the fragrance wafting across your garden-how wonderful that could be! You'll want to think about style or feel you want, though, they can be a bit dominant.

You might want to look at grasses, too. They're very contemporary, look fab in pots, no fussing with them to make them look good, and there are some really pretty ones. Katye's better at the grasses than I am, I can't remember the name of the one I'm thinking of, maybe she'll pop up and pull it out of my brain for me.

As far as the pots, maybe if you just made sure they were all the same color? I don't know what your budget for this is, but Costco has some lovely Vietnamese stoneware in browns-caramels, golds, chocolate, dark cream, all a little different, with a very pretty scrolled edge. They're medium-sized, maybe 18" high-and they're $29.99 each. Not cheap, but a fantastically good price for good stoneware, and they might make a nice wedding memento that lasts for years and years for you as well. They won't have them for very long, though.

The small-leaved plant in this picture is the lysimachia (Ignore the white flower, it's a vine that actually got a bit out of control)

Mstish and Susybell, THANK YOU SO MUCH!
It's great to hear from gals in my neck of the Northwest and you've both got such great suggestions!
Now I'm really excited to get going on this.
Mstish - beautiful photos of your backyard. Dreamy!
Susybell - do you remember which Costco has the deal on the pots from Vietnam?

I'm really excited and inspired: chocolate elephant ear, silver dusty miller, chocolate lysimachia, oriental lilies...

My fiance's family is from Vietnam. His aunties are awesome gardeners. If I could impress them it'd be quite a feat. In their back yards in S. Cali they have dragon fruit trees, enormous jade plants (half my height), all sorts of herbs, peppers, citrus trees and more. They do it all from seeds and cuttings.

Thank you!!!

Hi Rockems, you're very welcome :) I've seen them at the Vancouver Costco, and the Portland one off Airport Way. Haven't gotten to any of the others lately, but they're a featured item in their "magazine" this month so they should be at all of them-and you can always ask the supervisor folks at the front to look them up and tell you which store has them. Good luck!

I went to the Expo Home and Garden show this morning. They had both the Seattle Orchid Society and the Portland Orchid Society. I just had to take some pics.
Check out the curly tendrils on this baby

This color was even more magnificent in person.

I have never had luck with orchids. But I love them.

One more and then I'll stop. Does anyone know what this is?

No idea here - our friend Sally in Oregon grows orchids, but she hasn't posted in quite awhile . . .

Thanks, Susybell.

I love orchids, too, and have succeeded in killing several. I have, however, babied threee cymbidiums for several years and I now have a nice bloom on one and three flower stalks-to-come on a second. Repotting and Osomocote (sp?) must have helped. I will bore you with a picture when I get back out to the greenhouse.

I have heard several phoo-poos about petunias, but I must still brag about this one. It is a pink wave, as far as I know, and has performed beautifully in several pots for several years. It propagates quite easily and the one we shared with Azorina overwintered there in Gig Harbor. I keep a few "mother" plants over in the greenhouse.
This pot was my favorite last year. The Nemesia was a impulse purchase at Freddies in the spring and I couldn't believe how well it performed all summer. (Blueberry sachet), That is a single plant and the bonus is that it propagates also. The geranium was much pinker than it looks in the photo

Here is one that I was very happy with before I learned about all of the exotic things that you enablers have shown me.

The petunia is purple velvet, not blue, by the way.

This message was edited Feb 27, 2010 5:37 PM

And here is a combination I will work harder at melding together this year.

Those look very good to me. I would be happy with them.

Well, yeah. If I could keep my pots looking like that I'd be happy . . . I'm going through a begonia phase, so I'll have a lot more of them this year. And petunias are a great standard. When I lived in Kirkland I had a white petunia that lived through 2 winters. I wish I had more of that plant. Beautiful pots, Sharon.

Rock, don't hesitate to borrow containers from neighbors. They'll be happy to oblige. My friend Anita hosted a wedding & came begging for some color & I told her to help herself to whatever her husband could lift.

They managed to move TWENTY huge, heavy planters over the fence & back.

Of course, all the guests probably looked with pity at my bare garden & complimented Anita on her gardening prowess.

Rock, don't forget dahlias or Heuchera 'Mocha' for chocolate-y colors.

My containers in Illinois did beautifully -- the long heat waves?

Here is a row of experiments that worked out OK, given that the plants were in smallish pots.

Sharon your pots are beautiful.

Great pots everyone. I am just getting the hang of mixing plants in one pot. Somehow I always manage to get a water hound and a desert lover together. Or a sun freak and a shade lover. I need to put more thought and research into it.
Built a raised bed for a hosta garden this weekend. I'm getting too old for this weekend warrior routine. I am sore and hurt everywhere!

Sharon, don't apologize for liking Petunias! I still like Petunias too-especially if I can find those old-fashioned scented ones. And, those are very nice combinations. (it is hard to get the purple-blue petunias to photograph well-my shots usually don't look quite right.

Summer, is that Perilla or Coleus? I like the purple/purple combination.

Mstish, ugh, hard work! This weekend was a good one for it, though.

As far as messing up with sun/shade/water, of course, I've done it too. I think one thing that complicates things here is our cooler summers-some shade lovers can take more sun here than elsewhere, or things sometimes need less water, or more water, etc. It probably encourages me to just make the combos that seem interesting and see what happens. I've had lots of bleah or basically failed containers-but those won't be showing up anywhere here-the bad ones weren't ever photographed, just redone. ;) I've had failures with things other folks swear by-sweet potato vine has generally been a disappointment for me, and they're such stunning vines when they grow well. Same with Bacopa. It tends to just sit there and not do much.

Susy, I believe those pots had perilla AND coleus. I bought about 25 plants in the purple/copper range & divided themin differing combinations.

In my experience, all coleus can take full sun if given plenty of water.

This was my container jungle my last full summer in Kankakee.

Wow, some truely beautiful stuff! Keep them coming!

I have been MIA for a week, so am not going to try to comment on anything other than a quick "Welcome" to Rockems... great to have you with us!

This is the perfect time to have this thread as we are all thinking about what we will be working at putting our planters together soon!

I

I'm trying a golden nugget hops in a big pot at the base of our pergola where we plan to get hitched. Hope the hops will make a nice vine by August. Anyone tried hops in pots before?

Went a little crazy at the Home and Garden show and bought a bunch of million-bells that I need to pot in the front ASAP.

Pooling all the ideas you've all shared for the back. THANKS!
Gotta get my peonies in the ground - again, went a little crazy at the H&G show - before I work on pots in the back.

There was some reference to hops on one of the threads in this forum in the last couple of months. However, because we tend to wander in our discussions, it may not be easy to find.

Soferdig and Jnette, I think, were the major contributors to that discussion.

Rockems - the Callibrachoas (million bells) won't like it outdoors until the evening temps are reliably above 50°.
If you can keep inside for a bit longer - do so.
Did you get plugs? If so, they are tender - cover & protect well.

Thanks, Katye. I didn't know that. Yes, they are plugs and do look quite tender. Uh oh. I get ahead of myself with gardening. Will they die or just not be happy? Hmm...I may be the one letting *you* know the answer to that question. Rookie mistake!