Spring Planting

Hey there!  This past weekend, I decided that it's finally warm enough to make my annual trek to the nursery to buy plants and flowers for my pots and flower beds.  I love planting flowers and watching them grow, but when it comes to figuring out what to put in the ground and where to put it....I'm clueless.  I usually end up wandering around the nursery searching for inspiration and striking up conversations with strangers to ask about what they are planting and get ideas for what I might want to buy.  

Luckily for me, I do have a few old stand-by plants that come through for me time and time again, even if I don't really know what I'm doing with regard to placement.

One of my favorites for my flower beds are SunPatiens because they flower until I pull them out in the fall, and seem to do well in my very sunny front flower garden....

....and I also have had a lot of luck with Dahlias.  They also bloom all summer, and all I do is water them and pull off the withered flowers every few days, which keeps new blooms emerging until frost.  I love the various tones of the Tequila Sunrise variety!

This year, I'm trying  out Live Wire grass, which looks cool and is supposed to stay under one foot tall.  I'm hoping it will add some interest and help to fill the empty spaces that I always seem to have in my flower beds.

I will admit that I do find planting container gardens to be much easier than figuring out what to put in flower beds.  I use the thriller/spiller/filler formula to plant pots that have height, color and interest. 

So here's what I used for my pots this year.  Not that it's anything particularly groundbreaking, but if you're clueless about what to plant like I am...it might help you out!  All of the plants that I used in my pots this year are proven success stories for me--I used and liked all of them last year.

In my first pot, I used a spike (the tall grass),  white Wave petunias, and a black sweet potato vine.  I loved my black sweet potato vine last year!  It will spill over the edge of the pot and get pale purple flowers in addition to the dark purple leaves.  I buy Wave petunias mostly because that's what my mom swears by.  They flower all summer long and seem to stand up to the heat of the summer quite well. 

In my second pot, I used another Wave petunia (fushia this time), lime red coleus, and my favorite potted plant of all--Creeping Jenny.  It spills over the pot with delicate chartreuse leaves.

Next, I planted a pot with a red geranium, regular sweet potato vine and Kong coleus.  The Kong variety is my very favorite type of coleus.  I love the hot pink center of the leaves, and it seems to grow taller and fuller of other varieties.  

 Finally, it was out to the front porch.  I just popped some ferns into my tall silver planters for next to the front door and called it a day.

 I'd like to add one more potted plant out here, but I ran out of plants, so it's back to the nursery this week to wander aimlessly and ask strangers for advice :)

All of my plants are just babies right now, but I'll keep you posted on their progress as they grow and fill in!

What do you plant? 

 Will you come by and be my landscape designer?

Please?!