Porch season is here! Yippee! It’s THAT time of year!!! The weather is finally warm here, danger of frost is past…at least we HOPE it is…and it’s time to set up our outdoor living spaces for the season.
I have 2 outdoor seating areas - the back porch, and my new home office entrance patio that we did for the ORC challenge last spring.
This spring has been challenging enough without the ORChallenge, so I cancelled my participation in that this round, but hope to be back refreshing a new space for the fall round.
I’ll get to setting up the pocket patio in the next few days, but right now I’m focusing on our back porch, which is where we LIVE in the warm weather, and into cooler fall weather too with the help of Percy. You can meet Percy here.
Step 1: Acquire Plants
Nothing says summer like a riot of plants and flowers blooming, and nothing makes me happier than being surrounded by the beauty in nature! Yesterday I started accumulating the annuals to fill the planters for the season. A trip to my favorite wholesale greenhouses yielded a car FULL of wonderful things. We pretty much maxed out the cargo space.
I’m a big container gardener kind of girl. I prefer to dig in the clean, bug-free and worm-free dirt I can buy rather than the dirt in the ground full of unpredictable and unpleasant things if I can help it!
My porch cushions are green and yellow, so I always include yellow flowers in the mix. This year, I’m embracing the trend toward color in all things home with a riot of flower colors. I love the new varieties available…white latte petunias with chocolate centers, evening star in deep purple with yellow stripes, and queen of hearts with 5 red heart shapes separated by yellow stripes!
We’ve also purchased the herbs for the kitchen cutting garden-in-a-pot. Basil and rosemary are essentials. We’ll add sage and thyme and parsley and chives and mint to the mix today. And, I will reluctantly add cilantro for the rest of my family…though that may get quarantined in its own pot. UPDATE: it did not. Let’s hope it doesn’t infect the rest of the herbs.
This year I’m also trying tomatoes. Again. My track record with tomatoes has been dismal and generally the chipmunks eat more of them than we do, but maybe this year will be better?!
I believe the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result…I’ve changed the variety we bought so MAYBE I’m not insane…and anyway it was a relatively cheap experiment.
I’ve unearthed another mega pot that has been living in the garage for years to add another planter of flowers, because we got a little over zealous at the greenhouse…
A trick to using giant planters is to fill the bottom with something light that takes up space so you won’t have to fill it with dirt all the way to the bottom. I’ve used packing peanuts before for this. This time I used the empty nursery pots from stuff we’ve planted - they seem to multiply when I’m not looking and they are very light. Placed upside down and stacked and layered they take up a bunch of space in the bottom of the pot.
I still need to acquire a container for the tomato plants and maybe some other veggies like lettuce and peppers. I’m researching some vertical options. The porch abuts the house on two sides, so we have one south facing wall that might be a good vertical garden location.
The diva is also lobbying heavily for a gigantic palm tree we saw at the greenhouse, by which I mean she has said “I think we should get the bigg-@$$ palm tree for the deck” at least a dozen times in the last 24 hrs. I don’t disagree.
It would look fabulous and probably do pretty well on the porch…but a.) we have to get it home and b.) after summer comes fall and winter. Palm trees dislike cold and snow even more than I do. And I KNOW it will die indoors. We have a long history of murdering plants indoors in our house. I will probably buy it anyway. I can always foster it in the church lobby for the winter…it would be very happy there.
Step 2: Plant the planters
This part is underway and going well except for the aforementioned need for more containers. We always try to plant the pots with thrillers, fillers and spillers like we’ve shown for floral arrangements.
We refresh the soil by mixing in some new potting soil and some slo-release fertilizer. This post on container gardening has more info on that.
Some of our containers have evergreen shrubs in the middle for a tall element and for those we just underplant with flowers and some drippy greenery like ivy and vinca.
All our pots get some of the drippy greenery to spill over the edges. Then we’ll add flowers or herbs or both to the rest of the pot.
We have a few hanging baskets of mixed annuals, and a mandevilla plant that will climb a teepee of stakes (and anything else it can get at!)
I also bought a little topiary gardenia which is about to bloom. They smell divine - I hope I can keep it alive!
Step 3: Arrange the furniture and other stuff.
Our porch furniture actually stayed out all winter again with no ill effects. I can’t believe it - I used to haul it all indoors every fall which was apparently unnecessary. With the pre-vaccine stage of the pandemic, we started hosting friends on the porch on milder winter days so left the furniture out, and it has stayed out ever since!
The umbrellas, however, did not fare quite as well. I took those down and stored them under the porch, but our rabid wildlife seems to have chewed holes in one of them.
We also need to scrub the outdoor rugs, set up the water feature, and implement my idea to make the fire pit do double duty as a dining table, but more on that when we get it all done.
In the meantime, I’m reveling in this weather and enjoying the atmosphere we’ve created so far!
Happy Almost Summer!!
Other posts you might enjoy:
Top Tips for Planning an Outdoor Room
Simple Joys: Container Gardening
Thrillers Spillers and Fillers, the basics of floral or container arrangements