My First Container Garden

All of my living space is on the north half of the building, so I don't have any windows facing south.  I feel this has limited my ability to really explore an entire range of plantings.  This spring I decided to take my green thumb outside a little bit more and try a container garden.  I bought a half barrel to use as a planter and picked out some red, white and blue themed annuals.

A boxful of annuals, right from the nursery!

The barrel made its debut on my stoop April 17th.  There were a couple freezing nights for which the nursery put out freeze warnings, but my little barrel made it through!

The half barrel on its first morning with a flower load!

I was pretty good at watering it every day, but once it started to establish I found myself watering it less regularly.  We got a decent amount of rain in June, so I counted that as part of my watering.

I received these yellow begonias as a gift,
they seem to complement nicely!

Just one month after planting, the blooms are
spilling over the barrel's edge!

I think my lax watering strategy the past month has not helped maintain the blooms.  They have died back significantly and in fact the sweet potato vine has discolored to a rusty orange.  This one is supposed to be a deep purple, but it seems to get burned pretty easily, turning green then orange then crispy brown.  The white alyssum did wonderfully for at least 2 months - I could smell them every time I opened the door to go inside (oddly only entering, not when exiting).  The light blue (hard to see and I forget the name) did not bloom very long and the stems seem completely dried up by now.  I tried to go in and rub off any spent blooms, but it didn't seem to encourage new ones.  The deep purple flowers maintained a bloom most of the summer.   I'll take another photo tomorrow and amend this post so you can see.

The red blooms (again, variety is lost on me) did very well most of the spring/early summer.  Despite being just one root system, the blooms branched out across the entire barrel.  Conversely, I had 6 alyssum pods spread out around the periphery.