Do you have neighbors with gorgeous flower pots, window boxes or container plants overflowing with blooms and foliage on their front porches? They are so breathtaking! We have had many years of trial and error to try and perfect our container gardening and get our container garden pots to look like that. Last year, we were introduced to four new products that exploded our flower pots with a riot of blooms, so like any good gardener, we have to share!
This post is about container gardening with some container gardening tips, product recommendations and some of our favorite plants that we would recommend for container gardening for beginners.
Past Container Gardening Results
We have had moderate success in the past with our front porch container gardens—we call these large containers our statement pots. To be fair, we tend to like cheap container gardening ideas, so there are a few things we could do that would likely make our pots more successful. For example, we don’t replace the soil every year, and we get the smallest possible plants we can to plant in the spring. Although, even saying all that, we have been pretty happy with them.
This planting was a couple of years ago – pictures taken mid summer.
Once we got potting soil put in the first time, we never removed it. We add a little bit of fresh potting soil to it yearly. This pot had million bells, coleus, purple fountain grass as its main plantings.
This planting was from a few seasons back using some slow release fertilizer pellets mixed in our large pot.
We were decently happy with the prior plantings, thought they filled out fairly well and were pretty. On and off we had used some different fertilizer watering products, but stuck with Miracle Grow, or Osmocote pellets added to our soil mix, mainly. Sweet Potato Vine, coleus, million bells, verbena are the main plants here.
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Four New Products for Our Container Garden
This past year we tried something new and added in the following four products to our watering routine:
This product, affectionately called “The Green One” increases flower size, quantity and vibrance of color. It says it is designed to enable continuous flower production and we are ALL about that. We love lots of different and interesting foliage in our container gardens, but we also really want lots of blooms!
This one, not surprisingly called “The Blue One,” helps promote deep green foliage, root development and larger blooms and fruit.
This was the most interesting one to incorporate for us this year. It assists the soil in absorbing water. Have you ever watered plants, whether in the garden or a container garden, and noticed that the water just kind of runs off the soil? Almost like there is a barrier preventing the water from absorbing where you are intending it to go? That is called “ponding.” We previously had no idea there was a term for it, let alone a product that addressed that problem. This is that product! It can be used on any soil, and regular use will promote deeper root systems. Not just soil, but mulch, sawdust, peat moss, manure and other soil prep mixes will absorb water more readily.
Seedlingers liquid plant food fertilizer is energy-rich, teeming with the necessary energy to feed your soil, which, in turn, will feed the microbes that will feed your plants. We thought of this as a weekly shot of energy for the pots. *Friendly gardener to gardener heads up – this stuff smells terrible!! Dilute it quick!!*
If you are looking for more garden items or tools, check out our gardening storefront!
Container Gardening Watering Routine
We first came across these products via a TikTok video that we cannot find again!! If/when we do, we will update this post to give credit. But it showed a recommended watering schedule. It roughly went something like this:
- Every other weekend – water with EZ Wet and Seedlingers
- Every Monday – water with the green one
- Every Thursday – water with the blue one
This was the recommended schedule, and to begin with, we paid particular attention to following it. After a little while, it was kind of willy nilly. I think we were still pretty good at getting one water per week with each of the blue and green, and the weekend water more or less on time. In the summer heat, you have to water pretty regularly, if not daily, to keep everything alive, so we just took the easy way of tossing a scoop of something in our watering can.
We have a 3 gallon watering can and since all of these products need to be diluted in water, and the measurements given are per 1 gallon, it was pretty easy to measure out, even for those of us who are math challenged. Once we did it the first time and got the gist of the measurement, we just winged it the rest of the time.
All this to say, we certainly weren’t disciplined! It is also important to note that these products will last a long time. Even with regular usage, we didn’t really make too much of a dent in them. We have more than enough left over for this year, and likely beyond. In terms of long term usage, they are very cost effective.
Container Garden – Planting
Remember how we said we like cheap container gardening ideas? Well, this first picture is what our pots look like at planting time.
These are basic plastic pots with drainage holes, filled with a generic potting mix. Provided your planter has good drainage, it doesn’t really matter what type of container it is, at least in terms of seeing your plants grow. We added a little bit of fresh potting soil, but 90% is soil that was already in there. It wasn’t poor soil, necessarily, just garden soil from seasons past.
We look for small plants at the garden store. If we were more patient or had better planning skills we would start them from seed to be even more inexpensive. But alas, it is always a trip to the garden center (who are we kidding, we freaking love to go to the garden center) in search of the small pots or six packs of tiny starters. The key is to make sure to select healthy plants. One of the best ways to know the plant is healthy is if it has some new growth on them.
Once the plants are in, hope springs eternal! The gardeners motto, or at least it is ours.
We watered regularly, especially at first, with the four products listed, and nothing else. After a few weeks it looked like this picture below. These don’t technically get full sun, but they do get morning sun. To have a productive container garden we don’t think there is such a thing as too much sun. You might just have to increase your watering schedule.
A few more weeks later, it looked like the below picture. After this period of time we had some good plant growth and it started to fill out nicely!
Full Container Gardening Results
We took these pictures and video well into summer to show off our pots! Very happy with how they filled out and continuously bloomed on this watering/feeding regimen. We have two pots that we plant essentially the same, and you can see both in the video.
These plants continued to grow, bloom and fill out well into autumn. We had an early frost and snow in October, but had it not been for the early arrival of our winter months, these pots would have definitely continued to look good into November. These products really seem to allow the roots of your plants to grow so they don’t get droopy all the time from lack of a water source. Longevity of our container gardens is a big deal! We want them to grow and stay pretty for a long time.
Container Gardening Flowers
If you are like us, you like to use some tried and true flowers or plants in your pots, and then add in something that strikes your eye at the garden center. These pots are no different. The big tall plant was new to us so it was fun to see what it was going to become. It grew quite tall and leggy, with long thin flower stalks and teeny tiny flowers. We liked the bright green, waxy leaves, the height, and most of all – it is obviously a nectar flower! We had butterflies and bees all over them late in the summer. We still don’t know what this plant is!
These two are some of the stars of our pots every year – coleus and impatiens.
If you are interested in starting and want some advice for container gardening for beginners, here are some of the plants we love to use. One of the things we like to do is look certain types of plants for interesting foliage (sometimes the best can be vegetable plants), plus different growing types – some tall plants, some larger plants, some trailing or spiller plants.
A few of our regular go to flower plants for container gardens are:
- Impatiens – these little blooming superstars are always a good choice because they are just gorgeous, especially in shade or partial shade. They deadhead themselves and if they get leggy in the growing season, you can give them a haircut and stick the cuttings back in the soil or in some water on a sunny windowsill. They will root!
- Coleus – foliage superstars with instant color, we get these for all the different variation in their leaves. Often as a support plant, but sometimes they can be the focal point. Typically for shady spots but now they have sun coleus that are more hardy for super sunny spots. These are also plants we cut back to encourage them to grow nice and full. They also root so we will either immediately replant them or stick them with the impatients on that sunny windowsill for a pretty self sustaining bouquet!
- Sweet Potato Vine – these are our favorite trailing plant. They come in bright green, dark purple and a white and light purple/pink variation. They are so eye catching and so low maintenance!
Garden Center Recommendations
What you can grow will depend a lot on your growing zone. In the US and Canada, these are the typical way the climate is referenced when it comes to growing. The featured planting on this post was grown in Zone 3. Some of the container plants would not have worked if we would have planted it in Zone 8, where we previously lived. Some plants that thrive in zone 3 have to be given special care in zone 8 (like tulips, for example) and other plants that thrive in zone 8 can’t handle the cold of zone 3.
Given this, your local garden center is a great resource to get your plants since they usually only stock the popular plants that are hardy in your zone. Check with them for ideas on a combination of plants that go great together in combination planter container gardens!
Looking for more gardening talk? Check out our post on raised garden beds in our lifestyle section of the blog!
We hope this post on container gardening and container planting ideas was helpful and that you have a show stopping container garden this year!
Slowestuff
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