Beginning a Container Garden

A Hot Cop-of-Coffee is the Punchline. What's the Joke?

I love cooking, but hate reading recipes only to realize that I don’t have the star ingredients. That is why I decided to start an herb garden on my patio. I watched a few youtube videos on how to do this. I remembered my mistakes from the last time I tried to grow cilantro on the patio. My biggest mistake was that I didn’t drill holes in the bottom of the pot. I made that gardening attempt on a whim, and at first I thought I was doing a good job because the cilantro was growing really fast and tall. Then the cilantro died. My boyfriend later told me that this was because it wasn’t getting enought sunlight and that they needed to grow taller to reach it. I don’t know if that’s true because a website I read said that ‘bolting’ is caused by not enough water. I threw away thelovely, rotting pots.

I also had flowers in the…

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Patio clean-up.

Backyard.

My patio is also being very kind to us these days:

Patio, again.

Welcome to the family.

Beautiful Exteriors: The Patio

for love of fashion and design

I have a shared backyard at my apartment complex, but dream of an outside space that could be designed anyway I like….below are some fun and creative ideas I’ve found to share.

Starting with a small apartment balcony or deck I love this image of a cute garden bench and how cozy yet tidy it is.

Another good use of space is this wall garden. Colorful and modern, its a great idea if you want to grow plants, and have no floor space for them.

This patio furniture looks really comfy and the plants double as a privacy screen.

Loving the color scheme for this medium sized patio setup as well as the hanging lanterns. It must be so pretty at night too.

This patio is big enough to accommodate larger planter boxes for a a lovely kitchen garden. 

Can’t beat the view, but the shade structure over the deck is very sleek…

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On The Deck

The Midnight Garden

“Rabbit rabbit” and welcome June!   This morning brought news of Br’er Bear‘s arrival to our town of Orleans, but I’ve not heard further updates about his whereabouts as the day progressed.    Hopefully he’s enjoying a little quiet resort time before the weather takes a turn, although he does seem to attract the occasional helicopter.

Meanwhile, I thought it was time for a few more photos from the deck garden.   When I first moved in here, I was more accustomed to growing in the ground than in containers.   As you’ve seen in the last two years, I got over that pretty quick.  One of the things I like best about my deck garden is that it’s all modular.  I can move things around so every planting gets a fair shot at the different sun exposures of different parts of the deck, and also re-arrange based on what’s blooming. …

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Out in the Rain

The Midnight Garden

We’ve had rain all day.   Nothing torrential, or sideways, or anything exciting/annoying like that.  Just rain, enough to water things well, to clean off the pollen and give everything a good soaking.  The cucumber seedlings seem especially satisfied.  It’s always welcome this time of year, and I appreciated a few more minutes to sleep in this gray morning, instead of getting up to water everything on the deck.

You can see in the big planter (center) that the morning glories and cosmos are growing nicely there.   It’s the planter down and to the right that’s on my mind tonight, though.  The lantana (yellow) is starting it’s third summer on the deck and is now happily in full bloom.  The red million-bells petunias are starting to do their thing and there’s a legion of white allyssum growing happily around the edges, but not in bloom yet.

I’ve…

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Container Gardening

Knotty Design

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