Sandra’s porch plant
House plants and containers are troublesome.
At least they are for me. I tend to view house plants, after a while, as furniture I forget to dust. At least the furniture can be revived with a flick of the dust cloth but in a fit of remorse, I tend to over water the plants and they get root rot and die.
Even orchids, which can survive long periods of benign neglect, never re-bloom for me. But I noticed their foliage stayed green and healthy for a very, very long time. So I took myself down to the closest Michael’s and purchased one silk orchid stem (more than one would have looked too suspicious, given my poor record with house plants) and plunked it down into the living foliage. I never caught anyone sneaking a pinch of the flower to see if it was real. Success!
Not so much with the grow bags I started on my front porch this spring. I filled a couple of dozen with potting soil and planted them with tomatoes, peppers, beans and herbs. The bags might as well have been made with pillowcases for all the help they were to plants. They perked up after their daily watering, but after a couple of hours, they started drooping again.
Something was wrong.
I didn’t realize until a couple of weeks ago that a two-inch crust had formed on top of the soil, and my daily watering penetrated only far enough to resuscitate them for a few hours. This daily trip to death’s door and back simply exhausted them to the point that they gave up and died. So even though they are lightweight and convenient, grow bags simply don’t work in this climate. They transpire water too quickly. Back to the Farmers Market for me.
Even as I watched my vegetables grow weaker and weaker, the flowers in my deck rail boxes thrived. I had precious little time left over to give these the care they should have gotten, but they forgave me and bloomed their little heads off.
The Angelonia, (which came back from last year) were particularly lovely. Marigolds, which we tend to ignore because they are so “common” can always be relied on to give a burst of color to any garden. The dwarf variegated lantana almost dwarfed the Million Bells (Calibrachoa) and the Feverfew. For containers, more is not nearly enough!
For next year, I guess it’s back to old reliables; containers made from lightweight composite and galvanized tubs, both of which can be painted to suit whatever color plants you use. And of course, there’s always the container that Mother Nature uses:
The earth.
