Plant Spring Flower Pots
with
Amanda Switzer
Want to suppliment texture or add color to a part your house or garden where it is impossible to create a garden bed? This video demonstrates how to plant spring flower pots.
Transcript: Plant Spring Flower Pots
Hi, I'm Amanda Switzer for About.com Home.Flower Pots are actually Container Gardens that are placed around your house that need texture or added color or in areas that garden beds are virtually impossible to make.
Choosing Flower Pots
Containers are chosen for aesthetic reasons, and you can use anything from terra cotta, to concrete, to zinc, to whiskey barrels. But when you're using terra cotta pots make sure you store them upside down over the winter, so water doesn't get in there and crack them apart.
In this case, I'm going to use a terra cotta pot that was stored upside down over the winter. And what it already has, is a hole drilled-out in the bottom, so that the water can get out and the roots won't sit in there and rot all season long.
Plant Flower Pots
I'm going to make sure that the soil doesn't get clogged in the hole, is add a three inch layer of gravel on the bottom of the pot. So when the roots start growing and the soil gets packed down, it won't clog the hole that's already there, ensuring very good drainage.
Now it's time to mix all my ingredients together.
Soil Ingredients to Plant Flower Pots
I bought:
- Potting soil from the nursery
- Plant-tone
- Manure
So what I'll do is add a little bit of each, in the pot here, and mix it together.
I'm going to add a little bit of soil here, but I want to make sure not to add too much, because I don't want to overflow the rim of the pot. And I also want to ensure that I have plenty of room to add some plant-tone. I'm adding about two handfuls, maybe even three here. Remember this stuff is organic, so it's not at all dangerous to the environment. Then I'm going to add some garden manure which we all know this is very organic. I use gloves. The better combined it is, the less likely you are to burn out the roots of your plants.
So now that I've got it all combined, I'm going to start watering it in. The reason I water it in as I go along, is that water condenses the soil. At the end, when I'm finished, there's not this uneven kind of settling of the plant material.
Now that we've got a nice, moist, mixture of soil, manure, and plant-tone, and we are now ready to start adding our plants. So what we'll do is we'll take a cell out of the flat. Take each plant out lightly, one at a time. Set the plants on the soil level that we created which is about four inches below the rim of the pot, and pack them rather tightly. The reason I'm doing this is because I want a nice, full, pot!
We only have about a month and a half to enjoy this planter, so we want it to be nice and tight, and full. So when they really start growing, they start hanging over the edges and look lush and gorgeous.
Now that I have all my plants in a row, I can take a little bit more soil and fill in around the edges.
Now that we've got our happy planter of pansies, we can sit back and watch them grow for the early summer.
Thanks for watching. To learn more visit us on the Web at Homegarden.About.com.