To turn your IOTA garden pot into a work of art, you must plant it. Planting it correctly will mean the difference between exquisite long-lived plants that complement the aesthetics of the container materials and an urban eyesore. Make sure you plant your garden pots and containers right the first time to have a beautiful container garden. Here’s how.

Materials and Supplies Needed:

• Container
• Potting mix (not garden soil)
• Plants
• Watering can
• Slow-release fertilizer

Design and Colour in Plant Selection

Pot plants are great places to try new plants and interesting colour combinations because if you don’t like your creations, you can easily replant them. Here’s a trick for creating container gardens that look like they were designed by a professional: Make the plants “talk to each other.”

What does that mean? In such a small space, if you choose plants with six different colours, you’ll have an eye-popping garden of colour, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you select a group of plants in which each plant has at least one colour in its leaves or flowers from another plant in the grouping, the overall effect is much more harmonious. For more information about plant selection and designs, you may find landscape design ideas from several sources.

How to Plant a Container Garden

Select your plants. Container gardens need three types of plants: thrillers, fillers, and spillers. Thrillers are the stand-out plants. A thriller might have bright, big flowers, or interesting berries—anything that stands out. You only choose one thriller. For a larger garden pot, this could be a topiary or standard rose, lavender plant, or evergreen. You use fillers in odd numbers to “fill in” the container. Spillers are trailing plants that grow over the edge of the container. Purple scaevola and chartreuse sweet potato vine are two great spillers.

Fill your plant pot with potting mix, leaving 25 cm of space from the top. It’s important to use specially market potting mix rather than garden soil because potting mix is lightweight and has ingredients to promote water retention and drainage. After you have the container half-full, you can begin placing your plants. Some plants will have larger root balls than others, so you might be able to place one plant, then add additional soil and place other plants.

Finish placing your plants and add more soil to fill in the cracks between them. It’s important that the plant stems aren’t buried in soil, because they’ll rot. That’s why you need to be careful when placing plants in the pots and place larger plants first. Don’t be afraid to really pack the garden pot full of plants. Because you only grow them for one season, their spacing doesn’t matter as much.

Push the soil at the edge of the container down so that it is at least 3cm below the edge of the pot. This leaves room for water to sit and soak in when you water the plant. If you fill the soil to the top of the container, it will all run out when you water the pot and will make a big mess. This is also a good time to sprinkle some slow-release fertilizer into the pot. Add it around the edges and on top of the soil—don’t sprinkle it on top of the plants.

When you’ve finished planting, water the garden pot. Give it a good soaking and let the water run out the bottom of the container. Then, wait several days to water again. A good rule of thumb is to water garden pots when the soil down to the second knuckle on your index finger (if you stick your finger in the pot) is dry.

If you think that we have missed anything or you have a suggestion, feel free to share them in the comments below.