Week 21, Year 3: Container Party

This week I had the pleasure of attending a container party. A fabulous concept discovered and put together by two wonderful gardening co-workers. The idea is that each person is assigned a thriller (i.e., flower), trailer or filler and brings enough of that one item for each party go-er. It can be helpful to specify color themes - e.g., purple or pink thrillers, etc.  At the party, everyone brings a container and plants each item.  In our case, we had eight lovely ladies and seven great ingredients:

 

Everyone brought gloves and their own pots 3/4 filled with dirt.

 With ingredients in hand, we got down to planting. 

The result? Seven beautiful conatiners all using the same seven ingredients. Despite the identical ingredients, each container turned out differently, proving that every garden and gardener is unique.

 

 
 

 p.s., homemade mojitos (with fresh mint from our host's garden) make a great addition to any container party!

Week 12 - Year 1: The Great Indoors?

The downside of living in an apartment building is that you do not have much in the way of property rights. This week, I was painfully reminded of this fact when we received a note that the building would be power washed on Thursday and Friday and that residents were to remove all decorations from their porches, unless of course you were okay with having them be blasted in a blaze of water glory. Immediately, I was concerned for our plants.

We moved almost everything inside (while dealing with the additional challenge of putting them somewhere out of our cat's reach). It made a pretty funny picture - lining everything up on whatever ledge we could find. The whole apartment smelled like a garden when I woke up the next morning.

But, not everything was easy to move. The black eyed susan, clematis and morning glory have all wrapped themselves hopelessly around the spindles - leaving me in a catch 22 situation - move them and risk destroying them or leave them and risk a drowning. And, even with the ones we could move, who knows what lack of sunlight and closed conditions could do to them? Therefore, we decided to leave them outside and risk it. We also had to leave a couple window box hangers out because we discovered that a family of hornets had moved in, and we did not have any Raid handy for an attack.

To make matters worse, it rained on Friday and when I got home terrified to see what had happened, it appeared that no one had been there at all and our neighbors said they had not noticed any difference either. Of course, we had to move everything back outside, but we may be doing this whole thing again on Monday ...

Moving everything inside did bring some fun revelations though. For one, we have definitive proof that there was indeed a bird's nest in the sweet potato/coleus hanger. Fortunately, it has since been abandoned (could you imagine having to try to bring that inside with a defending mommy bird in the mix?). It's kind of hard to see, but I tired to capture it:

Second, the petunias' color is even more unique under house lighting. While they appear to be a silvery purple outside, inside they have pinky edges while the deep purple ones appear to blue indoors. Similarly, the shamrocks seemingly white flowers are actually the palest shade of lavender (though the photos were not able to capture this).