Ceri Thomas - Gardeners World - 101 Ideas for Pots: Foolproof recipes for year-round colour

Contents

About the Book

You dont need a garden to enjoy growing beautiful plants, as a pot or window box can be squeezed in anywhere. Whether you want to have colourful flowers or homegrown vegetables, 101 Ideas for Pots is packed with fantastic planting recipes to try. All are easy to do and will produce great hassle-free results. With ideas to create stunning displays for each season plus easy ways to grow vegetables in pots, youll never be stuck for ideas of what to plant.

Gardeners World Magazine is Britains biggest-selling gardening magazine, providing fresh ideas and clear advice every month. Find out more at www.gardenersworld.com.

About the Editor

After falling in love with gardening as a little girl, Ceri has been lucky enough to pursue her passion as a career. She studied horticulture at the University of Reading and the Royal Horticultural Societys garden in Wisley, Surrey before joining Practical Gardening magazine as a garden writer. This led her to work as a writer at Gardeners World Magazine and as an editor at bbc.co.uk/gardening and Easy Gardening magazine.

Introduction

You cant get much more instant gardening, or more instant satisfaction, than planting up a pot. A quick trip to the garden centre will reveal a tempting array of plants at their peak that can be grouped together to stunning effect. And if you fancy a change a few weeks later, you can swap things around or add some extra ingredients, with little effort.

For this book, we at Gardeners World Magazine have chosen 101 of our favourite container planting ideas to inspire you to try something new. Weve divided them into the four seasons for ease of planning and planting, and for good measure weve also included a few more that will look good all year round or can contribute to the cooking pot.

The secrets of success with container displays are to use good compost, to always put some drainage material at the bottom of the pot, and to keep on top of watering. Its no more complicated than that! (However, if youre new to pots or want a little more advice, youll find plenty of helpful tips .)

So whether youre filling the patio with plants or just want some colour by your front door to welcome you home, youll find plenty of ideas here to brighten your garden and lift your spirits, every day of the year.

Ceri Thomas

Gardeners World Magazine

Container maintenance

Throughout this book we will show you our favourite easy-to-create containers and give you all the ingredients you need to make them yourself. However, there are a few little things you need to remember when planting in containers, rather than into your garden, so here youll find a few of the basic rules.

(Where certain plants have particular cultivation requirements, such as acid soil or well-drained compost, this information appears with the relevant pot.)

Choose the right-sized pot. Sounds obvious, but its easy to underestimate how much or, more rarely, how little growth a plant will put on in one season. It is important to think about a plants needs when choosing a pot (some might prefer to be pot-bound), and whether you will be able to fit in all the plants you require for a display and give them room to settle in. If you are planting a more permanent display to last more than one season, find out what the long-term size of the plant will be, or bear in mind that you might need to pot it on. If your pot needs to sit somewhere specific, make sure it fits the space!

Check containers for drainage. Unless youre planting a bog plant, all plants in pots require drainage to prevent their roots becoming waterlogged and being deprived of the oxygen they need to survive. So, make sure the pot you use has holes for drainage, and if not, make them yourself. And to make doubly sure plants are not waterlogged, keep them happy by placing an inch or so of gravel, stones or crocks from broken pots in the bottom of your pot.

Get the right compost for your plant. Most plants will be happy with a general multi-purpose compost, but for any trees or shrubs that will stay in their pots for more than a year, choose a loam-based compost, such as John Innes No.3. Check the label of your plant or seed packet and find out if they have any specific needs, such as lime-haters requiring ericaceous compost, succulents and cacti needing specialist compost, and alpines wanting the very free-draining soil produced by mixing horticultural grit into compost.

Plants in pots are higher maintenance than those in the garden, so think about ways you can keep them, and you, happy in the hotter days of summer. When preparing the compost for the pot, mix in some slow-release fertiliser, such as calcified seaweed or Osmocote, to reduce your feeding chores. Remember that some plants, such as vegetables or greedy feeders like clematis, might also have specific needs.

To reduce your watering chores in the heat of summer it is also worth including some water-retaining granules. If you are going away (and were not subject to a hosepipe ban), its worth investing in a timer to water your plants. Simply gather together your pots, attach the hose system to the tap, set the timer and put a dripper into each pot then you need not worry about asking a favour of your neighbour!

Before planting up, give potted plants a good soak. If you are planting a mixed arrangement its also a good idea to lay out the plants in their final positions before you remove them from their pots. First fill the container with compost to the level of the base of your largest pot then place the plants (still in their pots) in position. When you are happy with how the display looks, remove the plants from their pots and backfill around them with more compost. Firm the soil, but dont press it down too hard or you will deprive the plants roots of the oxygen they need to thrive.

Finish the soil level a couple of centimetres below the top of the pot, to allow for watering.

So thats the basics to remember, but now its time to read on, to be inspired and, above all, to get planting!

Spring

Spring beauty Time to plant: any time of year

You will need:

1 azalea

3 campanula

25cm (10in) pot ericaceous compost

Azaleas will grow happily in pots, so if your garden soil isnt acid you can still enjoy these plants. Just pop them into containers filled with ericaceous compost and they will feel right at home. Take your pick of flowers from varieties in almost any colour, from deep red and pink to orange, yellow or pure white. Some even have a wonderful, spicy scent which fills the air on a warm day. Do note that while some varieties of azalea retain their leaves all year round, others are deciduous and lose their leaves in autumn.

For added colour, surround your azalea with three equally-spaced trailing campanulas. Again, youre spoilt for choice with these plants as they have blooms in shades of purple, blue or white. Planted around the edge of the pot, theyll tumble over the top and keep flowering after the azalea has finished, ensuring the display looks good well into the summer. Cut plants back if they begin to look messy.