I love hanging baskets. I know they are girly and I have to faff around tottering on a chair to water them every day, but I still love them. My husband doesn’t, mainly because he forgets they are there and bumps into them all the time. Sometimes there are great advantages to being small 🙂

I make my own every year and always vary them a little depending on what takes my fancy at the garden centre. This year I’m sticking very firmly in my little colour rut and so they – like the rest of the garden – are pink and blue.

I reused the wire frames and the very dilapidated basket inner yet again. The inners – which are made of some sort of unidentifiable natural fibre – are looking rather sad. At least they were looking sad until I got everything planted up, by which time you couldn’t tell the difference. I also put in a circle of heavy duty plastic in the base (circles cut from the potting compost bag) to stop all the water running straight through. I used ordinary flower earth, but put in some fertilizer pellets, as with water running through them every day I think the soil becomes depleted of nutrients fairly quickly.

This year I planted per pot one pink hanging geranium, Lobelia richardii, Diascia in pale pink and Convovulous sabatius. Once they have settled in and all the buds on the geraniums, which you can’t really see in the photos, have opened, they should make a really nice show which will last all summer long.

Once I had the plants, the whole construction took, ooh all of ten minutes! (And was a whole lot cheaper than buying something ready made!)

Now summer can really begin!

Helen

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2011 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Gardening. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.