Spring Container Gardening

Container gardening can be enjoyed by anyone, whether you’re a city dweller or a country cousin. Many people enjoy container gardening for the simple ease and convenience of planting flower gardens in containers or pots. This spring, enjoy container gardening with a new twist – special color combinations of spring flowers to delight you until early summer.

Pansy Container Gardens

Pansies are perhaps the least fussy spring flowers. They tolerate cold well, and continue to bloom until the summertime heat stresses them too much.

Pansies make excellent spring container gardening projects. Combine colors from the opposite ends of the color wheel spectrum for maximum impact:

• Yellow solid faced-pansies with dark velvet purple pansies
• White pansies with scarlet or orange
• Purple pansies massed in the center of the container, with the edges rimmed with violas (Johnny jump-up) flowers.

Spring Container Gardening Combinations

While temperatures remain cool and the weather stays iffy, choose cold-tolerant flowers.

• Pansies
• Violas (Johnny Jump-Ups)
• Annual Dianthus
• Stocks
• Tulips (started, available at garden centers)
• Daffodils (started, available at garden centers)
• Hyacinths (started, available at garden centers)

The list above includes three spring flowers that may surprise you: tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths. While most gardeners know that these are typically planted in the fall as bulbs, they can also be forced by using timed periods of cold followed by planting. Many nurseries and garden centers force spring bulbs, and sell them already growing and blooming in pots. These can be enjoyed as temporary, living flower arrangements indoors, or you can transplant them into container gardening pots with other flowers.

Some excellent combinations include:

• Rich, almost black-purple “Queen of the Night” tulips with yellow pansies
• Red pansies and yellow tulips, or red tulips and yellow pansies
• White hyacinth and any other color pansy
• Annual dianthus and stocks

What You Will Need for a Spring Container Garden

To create your own special spring container garden, assemble the following supplies:

• Large decorative container or pot. Plastic or ceramic containers are fine, but be sure that the bottom has drainage holes.
• Soil.
• Selected flowers
• Trowel
• Watering can

Steps to Create a Spring Container Garden

Once the supplies are assembled, follow these steps to create your own unique spring container gardening project.

1. Fill the container approximately two-thirds full with soil. Bagged soil purchased from the garden center ensures that no weeds or diseases are present. Such soil is typically sterilized with high heat, and sometimes available with amendments like fertilizer or peat moss already mixed in.
2. Choose your spring flowers.
3. Place the largest ones in the center of the pot, and mass the shorter ones around the rim. You can also group the taller ones towards the back of the pot, placing smaller ones decreasing in size as they move towards the front. Leave them in their original pots as you shuffle them around.
4. When you’re satisfied with the arrangement, remove the plants from their pots by inverting the pot, cupping one hand under the plant. If the plant is stuck, gently tap the sides and bottom of the pot with your hand. Little white thread-like things sticking out from the bottom of the pot are roots. Gently pry them off the pot and allow them to slip out with the plant.
5. Place the plant with the soil and roots facing down in the pot.
6. Place all your plants, then using the trowel, place more soil around the roots, tapping the soil down with the palms of your hand.
7. Once your pot is completed, water thoroughly, and water when dry.

Enjoy your new container garden for several weeks or months, weather permitting. Pick off or snip off dead flowers to encourage new ones to form.

If you’d like to save the tulip, daffodil or hyacinth bulbs, you can remove the plant once it is finished flowering, and transplant it to the garden. Be sure to baby it and do not snip off the leaves, even if it’s finished flower. The plant uses the leaves to store food in the bulb and create next year’s flowers.

Because many spring flowers prefer cool temperatures, the container garden may start to look drained when the hot weather arrives. Simply move the flowers into the garden to save them for next year, and use your pot for your next container gardening project.