Wind up the windowbox

Scotts Bay gardening friend, Jodi DeLong, loves to play with colour in containers, because if something doesn’t work she says there’s always next year.

Sometimes she’ll add a couple of different plants with more muted colours to tone down a mix if it doesn’t work like she anticipated it would after it’s planted. “For containers, hanging baskets and windowboxes, I do like vibrant, especially in spring when we’re all hungry for something bright and cheery,” she wrote in her blog (http://bloomingwriter.blogspot.com) earlier this summer.

Plants I always like to see in a windowbox are the trailers and drapers like ivy, creeping jenny, vinca and bidens. They add a rich lushness to combinations.

With seasonal garden centres marking their remaining annuals and container stock down to a pittance, now is a good time to pick up windowboxes and the plants to stuff them with.

Geraniums, marigolds and pansies may be some of the more common finds on sale but they also last the longest into autumn and will tolerate light frost.

Add water-soluble fertilizer every time you water and they’ll fill out in no time.

By fertilizing every time you drench these containers you are addressing their tendency to dry out quickly. Frequent watering washes out nutrients, thus they must be replaced via the fertilizer.

Great looking windowboxes have plants that are packed close together. They do require daily tending even if it’s just to check to see if they need to be watered.

The windowboxes on Madeline Ross’s house in Shelburne pulled me over for a picture recently. She told me the secrets behind her abundantly blooming boxes of marigolds, wave petunias and geraniums was to water them every day, feed them every two weeks with Miracle Gro and to deadhead faithfully. “When the flowers die I pick them off everyday,” she said.

Another tip to grooming is the occasional shearing back. I’ve done this with pansies and alyssum before when they start to look straggly and it helps to make them more compact and to produce another flush of blooms.