Bringing out the Deck Garden

It's finally warm enough to haul all the pots out from under the crawl space. For all of my new readers who are wondering what a crawl space is.....The original house has a full basement. We added a family room and a kitchen 16 years ago and under the new addition we just have this 4-ft high crawl space. It's perfect to overwinter all my container plants.
In the fall I just cut down all the foliage and stick the planters in the crawl space. Each spring I get them all out, Most are too heavy for me to haul out alone. Luckily this is one gardening task that DH does help with.

We hauled them all out last night.
I will leave them all here for about a week so they get acclimated to sunlight before I put them on the sunny side of the deck.


Most of them have started growing in darkness so the foliage is all white.

It turns green in a week or so.
I top them off with some new soil and give them a good drink. They are very thristy since it's their first drink since October.

I top them off with this mixture of one bag of cheap top soil and one bag of Miracle Grow potting soil. It seems to work well for me.

See this orange container?

It will look like this in a few weeks:

It's amazing to me that all of that is in there just waiting to push through the soil and burst into glorious bloom.

I don't think I am going to buy many annuals this year. I went out Wednesday to look for some and could not find anything I wanted.

Well, I found just one thing....this Gerbera that I couldn't resist.

I am not in the mood to plant annuals, so I think I will skip them this year.

If I come across six hanging baskets that look good, I will buy them later. At the moment I am not in the mood to plant my own.