Ready Made Planter
& Hanging Basket Fixes
In all the Garden Centres these days, there are plenty of beautiful, well started hanging baskets and planters. They look gorgeous, big and full often with a large variety of plants in them. So you spend a lot of money and buy a bunch of them only to have them start dying off after a few weeks. What can you do to prevent this?
#1 When you buy those gorgeous baskets and planters, they are already pot bound. In other words, they have outgrown their pot. There is no room for them to put out any more roots and they require endless and copious watering to keep them alive. Often even that doesn’t do the trick. The fix for this is to re-pot them. I do it as soon as I buy them. Purchase bigger (empty) hanging pots and planters that you can use year after year. In the spring, I buy the 10″ hanging baskets, stuffed with plants and as soon as I get them home, I re-pot them into 12″ hanging baskets that I purchased years ago, that co-ordinate with all my other pots. My planters are 14″ or 16″ planters and I re-pot the 12″ or 14″ ready made planters or even 10″ hanging baskets in these bigger (and matching) planters. They now have room to grow and thrive and if you put ordinary (new) bagged garden soil in the bottom and around the edges instead of potting soil, they hold the water better and don’t dry out nearly as quickly.
#2 Be careful choosing your the contents of your pots and planters. Some plants tolerate lots of hot, blazing sun and most don’t. Mixed pots often have plants that need lots of sun and plants that can’t stand much sun mixed up together, which is a real problem because half of the plants die by mid July. If your pots will be out in the blazing sun, choose baskets or planters that have highly sun and drought tolerant plants in them. Geraniums and Begonias and Petunias will tolerate far more than Impatiens (even so-called Sun Impatiens) and many other plants. I find that most of the extremely pretty plants that are in the mixed planters do not survive past mid summer, so I stick to the tried and true plants that I have learned do well without constant attention.
#3 The drainage of your pots makes a big difference. Hanging pots usually have the right amount of drainage, a reasonable amount, but not too much. The ready made planters are a different story. They usually have far too many large holes in the bottom and the water literally goes straight through them. They dry out in hours and need watering twice a day when it is hot, and every day no matter what. When you buy your new permanent pots to re-pot your ready made planters, make sure they have just a couple of small holes. If the holes are too big or numerous, I cover them up. I take a large plastic margarine tub lid and drill a few 1/4″ holes in it and then place it rim down over the holes that are in the pot already. You can cover this with gravel or just put the dirt straight in. This way the plants will drain, but not quickly. After a big rainstorm, the plants will not drown, because they do have drainage, but they also can be watered only every other day or even less, even in very hot, dry spells!
There is nothing like a bunch of planters and some hanging baskets to give your house that ‘well dressed’ look. But don’t give up if they tend to die on you, instead, follow the above suggestions and you will have big, gorgeous. colourful accents all summer long!
- Note: You can re-pot anytime during the summer. If your hanging baskets are not doing well, go out and buy a pot that is one size bigger and re-pot your drooping hanging basket. It now has more root room, more room for water and will perk right up, unless it is just too far gone to save. Oh, and don’t forget that a jug full of water soluble flower fertilizer every few weeks, really helps them grow and thrive!
