Container Garden Tour
Hi and welcome to Gorgeous Life Blog! If you are new here, my name is Victoria and I talk about all things related to modern elegance and personal growth. I’m very excited for today’s post because it’s something that I have been obsessed with for the past couple of months. I share a lot of updates in my Instagram stories, but I’ve never made a full post. I must admit that this post is long overdue. Today I’m giving you a container garden tour!
When I was googling other container garden tours, most of them were on youtube. I wanted to put mine in a blog because not all of my plants will be blooming at the same time, so doing one tour online won’t reflect the beauty of my container garden.
I have been documenting the growth of my plants for months and all of these photos were taken on different days. But that’s how gardens work.
In 2020 during the pandemic, I wanted to explore some elegant and feminine hobbies to keep me busy and make me happy. I tried many things and I have a post about it, you can read it here. One of my favorite hobbies was gardening.
Being a plant mom brought so much peace and joy. I loved going outside every morning and observing the changes in my plants, I loved every minute of the plant life cycle and watching my flowers grow from seeds. I felt a deeper connection to the earth as well.
This year, I wanted to expand my container garden to a mixture of food and flowers. Last year I only had flowers. I was hesitant to start growing food because it was my first time and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to grow food in containers. This year, I took a chance…and it worked!
Now that I have done a lot of talking, let’s get into the tour.
Container Garden Tour: Flowers
Hibiscus
Let’s start with one of my favorite flowers to have in my garden, the Hibiscus. I was driving past The Home Depot last year and saw them sitting outside. I couldn’t resist, so I purchased a couple of them hoping that I wouldn’t kill them. I have two kinds of Hibiscus, orange and red. They are both beautiful and they bloom almost every day.
Roses
Red roses are my favorite flower in the whole world. I have never had a rose bush before and I was nervous about starting one in a container. I purchased the rose bush at Lowe’s when it was just a branch. That’s what I call it at least. I put it in the largest planter I could find and to my surprise roses started to bloom maybe a month later! I love watching the life cycle of a rose and sometimes I cut them and bring them inside for my vase, but in my opinion, they are prettier outside.
Calla Lillies
I picked these up randomly when I went to the store for something completely unrelated. I’ve never had Calla Lillies before but these were so beautiful I knew I had to have them. They are doing quite well actually, my garden gets a lot of sun and heat in the summer so I hope they will continue to thrive throughout the season.
Sunflower
The sunflower was the most fun to grow because we grew it from seed. My daughter chose to plant a sunflower and I was curious because we have tried to grow sunflower in containers in the past and it didn’t work out very well. I discovered that this is because the container we were using in the past was too small. This time, we purchased a large planter from Target and the sunflower was able to thrive.
Lavender
I am very disappointed in my lavender this year, that is why I don’t have a photo of it. Last year I picked up a lavender plant and it smelled so amazing. It was already blooming when I bought it and it lasted all summer. Every time I would go outside, I could smell the lavender with even the slightest breeze. It was pure bliss. I genuinely don’t know what happened to my lavender this year but it doesn’t smell and barely even bloomed.
Pink Petunias…I think
I do my best to keep the little cards that come with the plant so I can remember the name and how to care for it. I’m pretty sure these are petunias. They actually died about a month ago (or so I thought). It turns out they just needed a bigger pot. I was able to move them and now they are coming back to life!
Fruits
Yellow Bell Pepper
I’m not sure what I did wrong with my bell pepper. I think the planter might have been too small, or I left it outside on a chilly night in the spring and it stunted the growth of the plant. Either way, my yellow bell pepper grew to a certain point and then stopped growing. It produced a cute, green pepper though. We were able to harvest it and use it for our stuffed pepper dinner recipe.
Strawberries
I’m very pleased with the strawberries! They are so cute and they grew much faster than I thought they would. Strawberries do not require a large container, so I was able to plant these in the spring and let them be. I enjoyed watching the growth process.
Lettuce
The lettuce was fun…until the earwigs took over. If you’ve never seen an earwig before, you are lucky. They are these hideous bugs that like live in the plants during the day so they can feed on the plant all night. What a mess. Earlier in the season we were cutting lettuce leaves as needed for our sandwiches. Now we don’t really eat it because the earwigs took it over.
Broccoli
What I didn’t know when I planted my broccoli was that it grows very quickly. I purchased this plant as a baby, put it in a pot and before I knew it it was already time to transfer it to a bigger pot! Within 2 weeks after moving it to the larger pot I was able to harvest the broccoli and have it for dinner.
Basil
My Basil has been thriving since the day I planted the seeds. It was super easy for me to grow. In fact, since the planter that I need for my rose bush was so large, I simply planted the seeds with the roses. It has grown to be a large, healthy plant and we eat the Basil quite frequently. I’ve also noticed that for some reason the bugs don’t eat this plant. They have absolutely destroyed my lettuce and the aphids have turned my rose bush leaves into swiss cheese, but nothing eats the basil.
Watermelon
Our watermelon plant is the latest addition to our garden. I purchased the plant a week ago so it is still a baby. I am very curious about the watermelon because it is supposed to grow to be 20 pounds! I will definitely keep you updated on that.
Pumpkin
Growing a pumpkin was my youngest daughter’s idea. She wants to make one of her favorite baked goods, pumpkin bread. I love the pumpkin because we started this one from seed so we have been able to see the entire growth process so far. We have just seen a healthy female flower and we decided to hand pollinate it because we don’t see many bees in our yard.
If we pollinated the flower correctly (it’s hard to mess up) a pumpkin should grow over the next 45-55 days. I’m really hoping that the bugs don’t destroy the pumpkin. They have completely torn up the leaves on my rose bush, they took over my lettuce and the sunflower leaves. If the pumpkin gets ruined before we can use it, we will be sad. I will keep you updated!
Final thoughts…
I do have some other flowers that I haven’t been able to photograph. I wasn’t wise enough to take good pictures of them when they were thriving and now they are dead because we left town and there was extreme heat and no rain. I have petunias, pansies, forget me nots, and one more but I can’t remember the name of it. If I can get good pictures of these flowers before the season is over I will update this post.
Container gardening has been a wonderful hobby for me and I only hope for my gardens to get larger every year. It is definitely something that you should try! It’s not too late in the year to get a plant or two. If you can’t start this year, make it a plan to start next spring.
