A Planting Past Due

It seems like spring flies by here in Texas.  It's winter, then suddenly it's kind of springy, then it's blazing hot.  There never seems to be enough time to get everything done and this year one of the things that slipped through the cracks was the large hanging basket we have.

It's a great big basket we purchased a few years ago at Canton First Monday Trades Days.  (Our favorite place to get all manners of items to re-purpose.)  We have planted it differently each year so far, learning new things each year.

Year one we went with a begonia, sweet potato vine, asparagus fern mix.  All were things we have on hand already.  It did pretty well through the season, except for the potato vine.  It's hard to keep it wet enough and by the end of the summer it looked pretty bedraggled.

Last year we went in a little different direction.  We still had begnioas, pink this time, and the sweet potatoe vine, but we added a few other plants to try to keep things a little more interesting.  They were a silver aloe that was homeless and desperately needed to be re-potted, a veragated pink bromeliad, and the Callisia fragrans we got at the annual plant exchange the the Daylily Society holds.  This year it looked better, especially after I pulled the sweet potato vine, but it still didn't look too great at the end of the summer.   Really the only thing that did was the Callisia fragrans.

Between the the sweet potato vine's poor performance in the hanging basket, and it's weird lolly-pop like look in our blue poolside pots, we decided to be done with it this year.  We were not going to use it for a thrid year.  Instead we decided to allow the Callisia fragrans to fill that trailing roll.  It sends out lots of shoots with plantlets on them, sort of like a spider plant does.  It also held up to our summer time heat and our lack of fertilization really well.

Here is what we still had hanging up as of the end of July.  I told you it was bad.  Nothing like ragged burlap, dead plants and old magnolia leaves to create a garden focal point.  Since we were having guests over for the Fourth of July, we finally made the poor thing a priority and got it down to redo the poor thing (please note, I should NOT have taken it down and now remember why I planted it in place the other two years.)

After dumping everything old out into the compost pile, some new burlap was in order.  We went with a Christmas bag that one of our daughter's toys came in, hence the fancy red writing.

Then we will filled that baby back up with new potting soil.  Most of the old soil had been in the basket for two years and was a mass of dead plant roots.  In an effort to keep the basket moist, so new soil was definitely needed.

The star of the show was a large birdsnest fern that my husband brought home for me to use somewhere.  I guess that was the one bonus of waiting to re-do the basket.  After it went into the basket it got quick trim to take off the damaged and brown leaves.  This will probably be the only time it will happen all summer because honestly standing on a ladder in the heat and mosquitoes to do fussy work isn't a priority for me.

After that addition we popped in a few begonia plants left over from a different project.  the bronze leaves will hopefully provide a little color and contrast with all the green in the basket.  They don't always hold up perfectly, but with regular watering and fertilization they typically do pretty well for us.

The final addition was the Callisia fragrans.  The Plant Geek propagated a whole bunch over the wnter.  In fact even after this was planted up there were still two hanging baskets full, 6 quart sized plants and the mother plant.  He's good at propagating things.  I'm trying to come up with a good place to out the hanging baskets.  While really it isn't thing particularly special, I really like this plant and I hate that they are just hanging in the greenhouse.

The basket looks great hanging off the magnolia tree.  There is sort of an open spot that it fills.  This picture also gives you an idea of how the shade garden is filling in. 

So what garden chores have you put off this summer?