Keeping It Tidy

Most of us have been spending the lion’s share of our time indoors due to wintry weather, so we mark our calendars for these events, tell all our friends, family, and neighbors, and start planning weeks ahead how we will assault the sale. We may not have anything special in mind to buy or we may have a list of plants we are trying to find to fill our garden’s needs. Finally, the day of the plant sale arrives. We get there an hour early, along with many other shoppers, meet lovely people, and select plants based solely on their emotional value. Exhausted and exhilarated, home we go with far more plants than we had ever imagined buying.

Some gardeners may plant their treasures that weekend, but most will take longer to get the plants in the ground, as I do, because it is very common to wind up with types and amounts of plants that you had not planned to buy.

Once home with my treasures, I am confronted with deciding where to store the mismatched potted plants until I can find permanent homes for them in my garden. I could put the pots on the ground behind the shed, but I might forget to water them. I could just set them in a row by the driveway, but the mismatched and odd-colored pots would look tacky there. So, I have come up with another solution. I have purchased two large galvanized tubs that I use as "holding areas" for the plants. However, any type of large container will do. I recommend one that matches permanent planters already in your garden or one that fits in with your garden design, as it could become permanent. I placed one tub in the sun garden to hold such plants as irises, lilies, crepe myrtles, etc., and the other I placed in the part of the garden that has part sun to full shade for plants such as hydrangeas and Lenten roses. I put the newly purchased potted plants in the appropriate tub, placing bricks under the smaller pots to raise them to the height of the larger pots. The plants look lovely and I can water them at the same time. This keeps the garden looking tidy and you have to look closely to see that these plants are not actually planted in the tubs.

Later, as I remove the pots and settle the plants into their permanent home in the garden, I use the same pot for something that I dig from my garden. I put these newly potted plants back into the tubs until I take them to plant swaps, give them to friends, and support local garden club plant sales. My tubs stay full of beautiful plants and I never have that area of small mismatched pots grouped in several places about the garden.

waiting for plants


waiting their turn to be planted