Color-filled flower pots {Sprucing up the Outdoors for Spring series}

Today we continue with our “Sprucing up the outdoors for Spring” series.

We talked last week about planting flowers and beautifying your flower beds.  But I also love to have flowers in pots too!  Ok, I pretty much just like flowers anywhere – indoors, outdoors, in pots…

And I like colorful or color-filled flower pots!  If you don’t have existing pots filled with dirt and are starting from scratch you will need to fill your pots with potting soil.  I had help filling a new pot.

Even little girls love playing in the dirt. 

And we had plenty of supervision

Then you need flowers.  Once again these are the packs you can get for $1.25-1.87 at Wal-mart, Lowes, or Home Depot.  Home Depot even had a sale on them last week for $0.87/6-pack -  too bad I had just bought mine 2 days before .

Then get to planting. 

And when you are done, don’t forget to water!

…and clean the dirt off your hands.

And you have some pretty pots for your front porch!  I would show you them in place but I am planning a big reveal after a few more projects so you will have to wait to see them on my front  porch 🙂

I did my back deck pots on another day and didn’t have any cute helpers.  By the way I got all of the brown and red pots on 90% clearance at Dollar General at the end of summer one year.  Paid $1-2 for each one.  So look for after-season clearance and stock up for next year. 

These pots had been on the deck all winter so they needed some cleaning out.

Here they are all cleaned out and the soil turned over.

And here are my flowers.  I love to use a variety of flowers and some green plants too. Look for 2-3 different type flowers and at least 1 type of green plant. Each pack has six plants in it so if you get four packs of flowers (less than $7 total) you can fill three pots with two of each type of flower which will fill in and grow bigger to fill your pot nicely.

I divided up all my flowers and just laid them on each pot so I could see if I had enough and was liking the selections.

Then one by one, I planted all the flowers in each pot.  And watered when done of course!

I love all the colors!  I have a lot of red accents on my deck so I wanted red flowers but loved the pop of yellow and the green/white plants too.  The variegated grass gives them some nice height.  I bought two grass plants last year and they lasted all winter!  So I added two more this year to two more of my larger pots.

Here you can see all the flowers – red pansies, yellow marigolds, white vinca, variagated white/green plants, and I think the red was a type of dianthuses?   All of these flowers do well in part-full sun which I needed.

Sneak peek of my little white pot on our coffee table   We built a new deck last year and I have never shared pictures here so look for a big before/after reveal post later in this series.

Hope that gives you some ideas for planting flowers in pots.  Don’t just stick to one color – vary your colors!  And don’t think you have to buy $10 plants for each pot – buy the cheap packs and bunch them together.

I will be sure to share pictures in a few weeks or later in the summer when these pots have filled out to show you how nice they will look.  (That is, if I can remember to keep them well-watered!)

Have you been planting any flowers yet?  In the ground or in pots?  What is your favorite annual flower to display?

{cj}