Summer Pots and Hanging Baskets

I might be working at this a little early this far north but, as always, I am itching to get the summer pots underway.  The Spring ones were still doing really well and I have kept the left hand one in place with a view to changing it when I see another hanging basket I like at the right price.  Meanwhile on a visit to Dunbar Garden Centre, because I got two fabulous pots from there last year for 'two for twenty',  I found the same deal again this year.  I have no idea how or why it happened but after giving the assistant our customer loyalty card we got two for ten pounds.  These may only look just OK for a fiver each right now but they have the potential for fabulous as time goes on.  What a bargain!

pelargonium, bacopa, petunia, lobeilia

The two spring baskets were still doing really well so I just dropped them into an appropriate size pot where they can continue to flower for a good while yet.

still looking bonny

I then moved on to potting up various pots.  

These Pelargoniums were two for three pounds from Aldi

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I has also bought a selection of hanging basket plants from Dobbies to mix around the pelargoniums.

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Most of these went into pots for the front garden

by the door

under the window

around the tree after squaring off the circle

looking forward to everything being fully grown

Among the collection was a couple of herbs.  I dug up the old parsley and re-arranged the plants in the little herb bed and planted the mint into its own pot to stand on the patio nearby.

I then potted up the chimney after removing the spring planting.  It takes imagination to see this with a huge volume of plants tumbling over the edges but it will come.

The rest of the plants went into two of the six new wooden planters which were bought for the gravel area..

The planters were £12.99 each from Aldi.  We had some delivery issues and some quality issues but eventually they were an OK deal.  

Initially I just put the perforated bags in the planters and tried to fold over the excess liner and to hide beneath the compost.  This didn't work very well.

One was planted with dwarf runner bean seeds and the other with salad leaves seeds.

For the other pair of long planters and the square ones I stapled the top of the liner to the inside edge of the box which gave a much neater finish.

The remaining two long ones were planted with three strawberries in each pot.  They were runners from my very old ever-bearer strawberries which I gave to my daughter a long time ago and are still growing strong.  I have never found a better strawberry and once they start fruiting they really do keep going all summer.

The two square planters were filled with a pelargonium and some trailing lobelia just to echo the pots at the top of the garden on the patio.