Garden Planters: Bring the garden indoors, or explore container gardening on your patio

~ Selecting & Arranging in Exterior Planters ~

Selecting Exterior Plants

All types of plants do well outdoors, however foliage plants do slightly better than flowering plants.  You can choose between annuals and perennials. Annuals grow and bloom at regular times, while perennials can be irregular.  They can be started separately by seed but when transplanting can put very closely together in planter since they only last during the growing season.  Annuals also have shallow roots so they do well in shallow planters.

Perennials can be arranged to give blooms throughout the growing season. They are deep rooted and can exhaust the nutrients in their pots in one season.  Annuals also need to go up pot size every one to three years or at this time split them into two smaller pots.
Some good perennials are English Daisies, Bleeding heart, Geraniums, and Tulips

Pay attention to the exterior of your house when picking out the plants to use in your planters.  For brick use a green, white or pale yellow color scheme in your flowers
For a white house/background you can use all color types. Though large concentrated color clusters will go farthest in catching the eye from a distance.

Placing Plants in that Exterior Planter

There are three main types of growth in a planter. Tall plants are between 8 and 18 inches. They make a good background for the smaller plants. Medium growth in a planter works as a central decoration while low growing plants in front to work as filler.  They can be groundcover such as Ivy.  You may also wish to use smaller shrubs and trees in the very large stationary planters.  They provide year round décor and can be handy for a little shade on the patio.

You can keep a constant bloom in your exterior planter by keeping plants in pots and exchanging the pots in the planter when the bloom dies. When placing potted plants inside the exterior garden planter you can cover the pots with a layer of pebbles or a layer of moss or vermiculite.  This also works to keep the soil moist around the plants.

If you place the plants in soil within the garden planter remember to water plants thoroughly after planting, When growing annuals you can place the seeds directly into the soil of the planter at their proper depth and width from each other.

A good porous soil is good to use for your plants in the planter.  Make sure to add plant food to the soil when you are placing the plants and keep about one inch of space between the top of the soil and the top of the planter.  This way you will be able to really water the plants without spillage over the edge of the planter

Caring for Plants in the Exterior Planter

Exterior plants can require even more watering than those interior plants and especially those plants in open soil that will need daily watering to keep the soil from drying out in the sunshine. Outdoor plants are more likely to freeze so the plants in the outdoor planters need to be well protected with lots of mulch or straw, or burlap or plastic cover.

To help your plants flower more you can pinch back the tips of your flowering plants such as the marigold.  This helps the plants put out new blooms and keeps them nice and compact.

If you have plants that are a little taller or have trouble staying upright you can tie them to wooden stakes to keep them straight and keep that garden planter looking neat and pretty.