I’ve also, for several years, had two hanging baskets that I usually put fuchsias into. A lot of the stores with garden centers in our region have a push with fuchsias at the beginning of April, so if I head to one of them in the first weekend or so of that month, I can find dozens of different varieties of fuchsia to choose from. Since I didn’t get to that until June this year, I had exactly two varieties to choose from, one that results in blooms that have dark purple centers and red exteriors, and the other has white centers with pink exteriors. There also weren’t very many of each.
A lot of people in our neighborhood have hanging baskets of petunias this year, and I found both some very dark purple (almost black), the the lighter violet with purple stripes varieties. So I decided to do fuchsias and petunias mixed in the hanging baskets this year.
In order to hang the baskets, I had to trim back the big climbing rose a lot more than I had planned on this weekend. The yard waste bin that we share with everyone else in the building was nearly full before I started working on our flower beds, and I’d added a lot of material Saturday. I didn’t have the official bags you’re supposed to use (when you buy them at a garden shop, you are pre-paying the extra waste collection fee for them, you see), so I couldn’t put anything that wouldn’t fit in the bin out there. But I did have to make room for the baskets.
It was also a little sad because about half the the rose blooms I had were on small spindly branches coming off the big mostly-dead branches that were in the way of wear the hanging baskets usually go. So we wound up with a bunch of pink roses in the living room.
The potulacas grow fairly quickly, so in just a few weeks they ought to be covering all the dirt in the planter shown. They also bloom multiple times each season. I picked up enough starters to put one to three each in the nine planters we usually have on the steps.
I have no idea how they manage to produce packets of seeds that all come up purple, when the offspring come out mixes of white plants and a few purples.
The other downside of the heirlooms according to at least one of our neighbors is that there have been patches of heirloom alysum popping up in yards all up and down our block since I first found the heirloom variety about a dozen years ago. I haven’t found the heirlooms in a few years, my I already have a bunch growing on their own. I added non-heirloom seeds to the mix, and since none of the ones coming up from seed are blooming yet, that’s why I picked up some starters from the garden center. Just to put the color there until the seedlings get bigger.
I get that alysum is a fairly aggressive ground cover. If they didn’t produce so many cute little blossoms on every single plant, more people would think of them as weeds than do. So I understand one of the motives of the seed companies selling seeds that produce mostly infertile plants (it also means we have to keep buying seeds each year, of course…), but I wish it were easier to reliably get the heirlooms.
I pulled weeds out of only one small part of one flower bed. I need to weed a lot more next weekend and get the rest of the crabgrass out from around the irises. I’m a little surprised as how the crabgrass is starting the strangle out the irises. I didn’t think anything could overwhelm those!
Wait here, Audrey. This is between me and the vegetable. —Seymour, Little Shop of Horrors
I’m looking for the sea otter planter!!…. any idea where you got it??
It was a gift.
But I have seen virtually identical ones nearly every year in the spring in the garden department of stores such as Fred Meyer.