Picture Perfect Cooking

For today’s Thoughtful Thursday post, I thought I would share a little tutorial on how I create the flower pots that decorate our home during the summer.  I love to garden and I come from a long line of flower lovers!  My nanny (maternal grandmother) has many flowers around her house and geraniums are one of her favorites.  It seems that she has passed that love down to me because I always use them in my pot designs. 

We have red metal chairs on our front porch so I usually do a red, white, and blue theme for the pots on that.  For the deck pots in the back of the house, I decided to go a bit bolder by using hot pink, purple and white.

This year I purchased Rocky Mountain Violet and Rocky Mountain Dark Red zonal geraniums as the base plants with the following as my fillers:  For impact in the back of the pots, I used spikes in all of the containers.  For the front porch, I also used Mealycup Sage (Salvia) in Sallyfun Blue; and for the back porch, I used Angelonia (Summer Snapdragon) Alonia White.  To fill in the sides, I used Diamond Frost in all of the pots.  I still needed something that would drape over the front so I chose Scaevola (Fan Flower) Bombay Dark Blue for the front and Calibrachoa Callie Dark Blue for the back.

To make the pots easier to move around, I used a trick my mom taught me.  Fill the pots about halfway with pieces of Styrofoam and then add the potting soil.  It works like a charm every time!

Now it is time to add the soil.  Fill up the pot to about 3 or 4 inches of the top and then “dry fit” the plants to your satisfaction.

Once the flowers are placed where you want them, fill in around the root balls with potting soil and gently press everything together.  Place your pots in their location and water well.  I try to water these every day and fertilize at least once a week, if not twice.

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Well, spring has finally sprung around here and that means it is gardening season!!! YAY!  As some of you know, I have one raised garden bed in the backyard already and I hope to build another this year.  Here is a shot of last year’s garden at the end of May:

I have already purchased quite a bit of the seeds that I will need so there will just be a few things that I will pick up later, like sweet pepper plants and a few herbs.  This year, the seeds came from R.H. Shumway’s because Nanny wanted some tomato seeds that only they carried, so I ordered mine from there, too.

Hopefully in just the next couple of weeks I will get the lettuce and carrot seeds in the ground, then around the first of May, the remaining “crops” will be planted.  Here are the lettuce and carrot varieties that I am trying this year:

I also ordered the cucumber seeds and a package of sunflower seeds as well.

My father-in-law raises bees and he went to the “bee store” for supplies a couple of weeks ago and brought me these:

I think I am going to make a small bed around the corner of the fence in the backyard and make that a  “bee garden”.  Hopefully these seeds, along with my sunflower seeds, will draw in bees and birds alike.  I can’t wait to get started!  Happy gardening!

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