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?!  

Adventures in Gardening

I got a little adventurous with my potted plants this year, and since they are doing well for once I thought I would share what worked for me. 

I love potted plants around the patio and on the front porch.  For just a few bucks, they add a lot of color, soften the hard edges of the patio and fill up the outdoor spaces nicely.  Usually when putting together potted plant, I throw a bunch of varieties of coleus in a pot and call it a day.  I love coleus.  It's colorful, grows large and is hard to kill.  Plus, it's gorgeous.  Here's my favorite variety.

 

But pots with only  coleus are a little one note, so this year I made it my mission to choose plants that would add some more interest.  The trouble is, I don't really know a lot about plants and gardening.  So what should I choose when plant shopping?

 

I prepared for my trip by doing some internet research, and the consensus seemed to be that an interesting potted plant should contain three elements: a spiller, a thriller, and a filler.  'Spiller' plants are those that will spill over the edges of the container and cascade toward the ground.  'Filler' plants take up space, while 'thriller' plants add height, color, and drama.  Well that makes sense, and is easy to remember!

 



So using those rules, I branched out and made some new additions to my pots this year. I didn't know this black sweet potato vine even existed until this year, but look how gorgeous it is!  If you look closely, you can see one of the pretty purple flowers that grow on it. I also planted a spike (the tall grass) in this pot to add some height.

I branched out even further with pot on the right.  It has regular sweet potato vine (the large chartreuse leaves 'spilling' toward the ground on the far right) along with purple petunias, another spike, and a hot pink geranium.  Four plants in one pot?  Crazy!

The plant on the left has another variety of coleus and red petunias.

 

 

But my favorite new plant find of the year was this one.  It's called Creeping Jenny, and its awesome.  It's got color, texture, and such pretty way of cascading toward the ground.  It makes me wish I had bigger pots, so it had further to fall. 



 

Here it is with black petunias, a pink geranium, and yet another variety of coleus (the red leaves in the background).



I like to use Miracle Grow potting soil in my pots, and I also put several Jobe's Fertilizer Spikes in each pot to keep the plant supplied with a food source.  I water the pots every few days, and on August 1st they still look great!

 

 

What do you plant in your pots?  I'd love new ideas for next year!

Evolution of Our Home: Exterior Edition

Writing a progress post about the exterior of our home is a tough one for me, not because we haven't done anything to the outside of our house (we totally have), but because there's some areas outside our house where I'm not at a comfortable resting point yet. And showing you pictures of those 'not even close to done' areas is not really getting me all that excited.

But I'd be full of (insert your word of choice here) if I waited until I was happy with every single area of our home before I was willing to show pictures.  For one thing, I'd only get to post about twice a year.  And for another, that's not how DIY/home improvement/decorating works around here.  We do things as we have time, money, and inspiration.  So that leaves an awful lot of in-between time.  So in the name of keepin' it real, I've got to show you the not-so-fab stages, too.

BECAUSE I'M KEEPING IT REAL!  (Movie quote, anyone?)

So, here we go.  Here's the front of the house a few days after we bought it.  We had already ripped out some of the weeds in the flowerbeds, but other than that its our true 'before' picture.

 

 

And here are a few after we did some trimming, mulching and other landscaping

 

The front porch before...

And during....
This is one of those pictures I'd rather not show you.  Notice the concrete that still clings to the remnants of the glue left behind the carpet in the before shot.  The zebra rug was a failed attempt to cover up the nasty concrete, but has become a haven for dirt, mulch, etc.  So it's sort of a lose/lose situation where I don't know what's better: the rug or the concrete.  I'm dying to try an acid stain on the concrete!

On the bright side,  the door has been dressed up a bit.

Onward to the back patio.  Here's the before...

And in progress.  Basically all we've done here is replace the grill and  patio set with options that better fit the space and add some potted plants.  My husband would love to install an outdoor fan, and I'd kind of like the expand the whole patio area to create a lounging area separate from the dining area.  Maybe with a fireplace? You've gotta dream big, people.

 

And finally, the back of the house before...

And after we trimmed bushes, replaced others, and mulched.  There's not much else to be done back here, other than add some stone pavers to line the flowerbeds. 

So that's pretty much where we're at!  I'm not nearly as inspired when it comes to our outdoor spaces, as compared to our indoor spaces (which I could easily decorate over and over again!).  How do you spruce the exterior of YOUR home?

Patio Botox

Our patio table needed a facelift. Well, maybe I can't call this project a full 'facelift', as it was quick, cheap, and meant to 'smooth out the wrinkles' in order to maintain the youthful appearance of the table.  I guess this was more like a patio table botox injection.

The table itself is pretty old, handed down to us in the Great Patio Furniture Switch of 2010, where my parents got new patio furniture, gave us their old stuff, and we in turn gave our high top bistro set to my brother and his wife.  A bunch of things in our home have been handed down to us from our families, leading me to term our décor style Castoff Chic. 


Anyway, the patio table is all metal, and the rust was starting to wear through, giving the otherwise green table a brown rusty sheen, depending upon the angle from which you viewed it.  See?

Nothing a little spray paint couldn't fix.

I love spray paint.  It almost makes me giddy that I can so easily change the appearance of something that I'm tired of into something fresh, new, and lovable again.  I love it so much that I bought seven cans of it this week, in preparation for a soon-to-be-revealed project.  Get excited, people. I know that I am!

So, I dragged the table out into the yard, gave it a quick once over with a wire brush to remove any loose paint, dirt, and cobwebs that may have clung to it. A quick spray with the hose to clean off any remaining debris was all that was needed before I was ready to spray away.

While it was empty, I also gave the patio a good cleaning with the hose.  It's amazing how much dirt spider webs dead bugs, crap accumulates in such short periods of time.  In fact, that's one of the reasons that I've resisted using outdoor cushions, pillows, rugs, and other items that I see others using in their outdoor spaces.  How do people keep all of those things clean, dry, and mildew free?  If there's a secret, I'd love to know it, because I think those accessories look great! But, there's no way that I'm bringing all of that in every time it rains,  and they seem to be a collecting place for dead bugs, leaves, or dirt, so I just skip them all together.  I'll admit, I do have a serious case of patio envy whenever I see a space that is basically an outdoor living room, though.

I used green Rustoleum spray paint, and was pleased with how quickly it covered the rust spots.  It took two coats, and each one took only about 15 minutes to dry.  What a difference it made!!  Spray paint, I love you. Our table is like new again :)

While I was at it, I also touched up the paint on the chairs that sit just outside our sliding door.  They too had rust spots, but I couldn't simply spray paint the whole chair because they have a plastic basket weave that makes up the seat and back of the chair.  So I just used my drop cloths to shield the areas that I didn't want the paint to reach and carefully spot-sprayed them.  I didn't think to take before pictures, but trust me, they look a lot better too.

Here's the full on post-botox patio shot.  I got a little more adventurous with my potted plants this year.  More on that later.

 

 

Have you 'botoxed' any items in your home in order to make them like new again?  Tell me about it!