Best Baskets

Everyone loves a great garden. People of all ages, income, race - everyone- loves a beautiful garden. But even though virtually everyone appreciates a garden, there are many who’s love ends right there. It’s hard for me to understand. I pour over every page of the seed catalogues that arrive in January’s mail. I start dreaming early March about getting my hands into the earth, about what new hybrid will be hot this season and I plot, plan and sketch the newest garden that will grace my yard.

The first words I hear out of the majority of my landscape client’s mouths are, “I’d like a beautiful garden, oh, and no maintenance, please.” Ok, I get that. We live in a world where time is limited and precious.

What I never could understand is visiting my sister-in-law (I won’t mention names, because that could be embarrassing, right Alice?) and seeing flower baskets hanging all around her porch. I know, you’re thinking, ‘what’s odd about that?’ There inside the baskets were all colours of no maintenance geraniums. The fake kind! Plastic, silk, whatever they were, there wasn’t a live shoot to be seen. Be still me heart, how could it be that someone so close to me, would opt for that kind of hanging basket?

But it did get me thinking. How can people have really great looking hanging baskets, the mother of all high maintenance gardens, and not have to maintain them on a daily basis?

The easiest answer is to add a drip line onto your irrigation system and have a line go into each of your baskets.

For the majority without irrigation systems, here are a few tips for your hanging baskets. First, buy good quality baskets. A good basket will be one that is made with sphagnum moss, or has a coconut liner. This sort of basket helps to hold water in the container as well as the soil. They are thick and insulate the soil from the heat of the sun. Other good choices are baskets made from foam, which are light and also have insulation value and baskets that have a built in water reservoir that works on a capillary action.

Second, buy big baskets. Baskets that are at least 18 inches in diameter, but preferably 24 inches, will hold water much longer than a standard 10-inch basket.

Third, add peat moss and water holding polymers into your soil. These additions will lengthen the time between waterings. Adding slow release organic pellet fertilizer will eliminate the need to fertilize until at least the end of July.

For baskets that need even less water, forego the traditional basket flowers and opt for more drought tolerant ones. Great drought tolerant plant picks are: portulaca, love lies bleeding, coreopsis, dusty miller, trailing vinca, dichondra, all herbs, and any succulent ie. hens and chicks or echiveria.

I’m happy to report that my sister-in-law no longer torments me with fake baskets. Sometime after my initial horror, she became a passable gardener. Her fakes have been replaced by wonderful, colourful living plants. And you can grow them too!