Hanging Baskets

Hanging baskets are one of the best ways to bring immediate color to areas of your home and garden, where growing plants in the conventional way may be difficult.

They can be positioned by the entrance door, to add a welcoming note for visitors, or to bring color to shadier areas. It's just a matter of providing a suitable bracket from which to hang the basket. Do remember that even a small basket, when filled with potting compost and well watered, weighs a great deal. So make sure your bracket is firmly fixed to the wall . Special anchor bolts, rather than simply a screw and a plastic wall plug are the order of the day.

As with all planting, you should consider the conditions of the area where the basket is intended to hang, before choosing your plants. So, if your basket is intended to brighten up a shady area, you should consider using a fuchsia as the centerpiece for height and surrounding it with shade tolerant plants such as impatiens, otherwise known as "Busy Lizzy". This plant originates on the floor of tropical rain forests. From this, you can understand the conditions it likes best: warmth, plenty of moisture and not over-bright conditions. For planting in the sides of the basket, trailing lobelia is ideal, as it tolerates both sunshine and shade.

If you are planting for an area that gets a lot of sun, you should use a geranium for your height giving central plant and under plant with petunias. When established these will tend to spill over the sides of the basket, although you should also plant the sides of the basket with contrasting lobelia.

No plants give of their best in windy conditions and by hanging up there in mid air, hanging baskets are at more risk of windy conditions than plants at ground level. Although hanging baskets can tolerate a certain amount of wind without detriment, do avoid areas that are prone to wind. For example, sometimes two buildings together tend to take on the conditions of a wind tunnel and amplify the windy conditions.

Trailing lobelia, in particular, does not like wind and, if you find the tips of this plant turning brown, too much wind is probably the cause.

In order to get the maximum flowers from your baskets you should make sure they never dry out and have an adequate supply of high potash fertilizer. You can give them this by either mixing a slow release fertilizer in the compost, along with some moisture retaining crystals, or you can give them a liquid feed of a high potash fertilizer as recommended by the maker's instructions.

You should water the baskets as often as once a day in very sunny or windy conditions. You might find baskets in shadier, sheltered areas can go a bit longer between watering, although the fuchsia/ impatiens shade basket will appreciate being sprayed with a fine mist of water on hot days — provided the sun is not shining directly on them.

Dead head your plants regularly, to encourage more flowers, and you will be rewarded with a very long season of continuous color.

Tags: Hanging Baskets

Creating a container garden is a wonderful way to make use of spare patio, deck or balcony space. It's also an excellent way to have a beautiful garden even when you live in a home which has no outdoor yard or garden space too. Many people who live in an apartment in the city for instance, create container gardens on their balcony or patio area, and some even create them using window boxes which are attached to the outside of the building just under their windows.

Container gardens are fun to create for indoor areas too, using a wide variety of plants and flowers that will spruce up your home. In fact, almost any plant or flower can be grown in a container. Plants which grow quite large will need larger containers of course though, and if you start bushes, shrubs or trees in a container you'll eventually need to transplant them outside in the ground unless they are miniature varieties.

Some of the most popular types of container gardens include: Herb gardens in the kitchen or morning room; Annual or perennial gardens on the patio or inside the home; Vegetable gardens on the patio, balcony or deck; And even specialty gardens such as container salad gardens.

Most people have their first experience with container gardens when they buy a beautiful, lush arrangement of flowers or greenery at the store. These containers are usually filled to the brim with new flower blooms, or trailing vines that cascade over the side of the container.

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves with dead plants just a few weeks after having bought the beautiful arrangement, and they're at a loss as to why the plants didn't live. The answer is simple though. When you buy a ready made container garden at the store which is packed full of blooms and greenery, the container is usually too full for the plants to have the room they need to grow, live, and thrive.

To keep container garden plants alive for long periods of time, you must make sure they have enough room for their roots. Some plants have much larger or longer root balls than others too, so those plants will require larger containers in order to continue growing successfully.

If you really like the way a ready made container garden looks, you can take steps to keep it alive and beautiful in your home. When you buy the garden, simply buy a new, larger container to transfer the garden to. When you get home, just remove the plants from their original container and place them into the new one with additional soil. You may have to separate the plants a bit if they're all tangled together, but generally you can keep the arrangement looking very similar to the way it was when you bought it.

The larger container will give the plants more room for their roots to spread and grow, so your new garden will continue looking lovely for a very long time. As the plants continue growing though of course, you may need to ocassionally transfer them to another, even larger pot. Alternatively you can separate out some of the plants into smaller containers, and you'll have multiple container gardens instead of just one.

Tags: Container Gardening