2016 Container Garden

It has rained nearly every day for over a month.  We've had a few moments of actual sunshine lately, though, so I seized the opportunity to take some photos of this year's container flower garden on my deck.  Here it is!

Also, down to the left we have my two bigger pots that used to have my lavender plants in them.  I got those in the ground at last (we'll see if they manage to grow or not), so now we have blueberry bushes in these pots, since those didn't do well in our clay-y ground.  So left-to-right here, we have blueberry bush, blueberry bush, a few lilies-of-the-valley left over from when I divided the patch of those out front, and some magenta petunias that Tootie chose at the store.

Moving on up, we've got these two lovely double-layered pots.  I planted purslane in the top of both of them, and then it never came up, and it never came up, and I gave up on it and bought some pretty purple lantanas for the tops... and when I planted those, I discovered the purslane is coming up at last.  So left that plenty of room in both pots.  I planted marigold seeds in the bottom of the left pot, and bachelor buttons in the right one, but the buttons never came up, so I put in some petunias that Sarah (yellow) and Sam (purple) chose instead.

My three biggest pots are a delight this year.

The ones on the left and right have yellow pansies and purple johnny-jump-ups that are from last year!!!  They stayed alive over the winter and started blooming in March again.  They're huge and bushy and great.  I stuck some pale-ish blue lobelia in those pots too because they each had an empty spot where something last year died.

The center pot is all new stuff.  I stuck a "bandana" lantana in the very back, flanked by a yellow dahlia on the right and a "starsisters" dahlia on the left that had a gorgeous two-color bloom on it when I bought it, which promptly snapped off in the car on the way home -- but it has lots of buds, so I'm hopeful.  Anyway, directly in front of the lantana are 4 celosia, one of which has already died off.  I tried them a few years ago and was disappointed by them, but my dad grew them really well in his container garden, so I thought I'd try them again.  We'll see what happens.  Then in front of those is a yellow "sunsatia" with delicate flowers I love.  Flanking that are two "Aloha Kona" calibrachoas, which should get drape-y and awesome like the ones I've had previous years.

Finally, to the right of that trio is another double-decker pot with a purple lantana and some tiny purslane shoots on top, and more marigolds coming up in the bottom.  The yellow pot in the foreground has another lantana (I got a little nutty with those this year -- usually I just have one or two, but now I have five).

And the three on the stand belong to Sam, Sarah, and Tootie, arranged according to their age, with Sam's on top, full of bachelor buttons we planted as seeds.  Sarah's middle pot mostly has these succulents called portulaca that seem to have reseeded themselves from last year.  She planted a few marigolds in with them, though, because Sam and Tootie were getting to plant seeds.  The bottom one is Tootie's, with different bachelor buttons from seeds.

Now I'll share a few close-ups just because I love taking pictures of flowers :-)  Here are the johnny-jump-ups:

The lobelia:

The sunsatia:

The calibrachoa:

The dahlia (and yes, I totally chose these because of the Alan Ladd movie The Blue Dahlia):

The "bandanna" lantana:

And here are a few of the johnny-jump-ups and some roses from the bush by my front door, which I stuck together in a jug to decorate our table when we had some company over for supper last week:

I don't know much of anything about arranging flowers, but a bunch of fresh blooms stuffed in a little jug almost always turn out pretty, I think.  We were celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday, so I wanted to dress the table up a bit.