Who doesn’t love a beautiful container garden? A lush inviting mix of textures and leaves and flowers that draws the eye and enriches the view. To keep container gardens and window boxes looking their loveliest, proper watering is critical. Water is crucial for promoting growth and sustaining the appearance and life of your plants. Container gardens and window boxes should be watered at least once a day during the growing season, and even more frequently on extremely hot days or during extended periods of drought.  At Copper Penny Flowers, we like to water our window boxes early in the day and at dusk when temperatures are lower and evaporation is reduced.  Don’t wait for your plants to be droopy and drought-stressed. Plants that cycle through consistent periods of extreme dryness and then extreme water will not be healthy and will not maintain consistent flower production–all of the plant’s energy goes into trying to stay alive, not into producing flowers.

In addition to watering, we also encourage gardeners to fertilize every time you  water. The greenhouses and growers fertilize constantly; that’s part of the reason plants look looks so great when you purchase them! And dead head regularly. By dead heading, you encourage the energy of the plant to go toward producing new buds, not into shedding the old ones.

Lastly, do trim back window boxes and container gardens when they get long and leggy or overgrown.  At some point, you will need to pull out all your overgrown or failing plants and start over. We like redoing container gardens and window boxes regularly as the seasons change. For our clients, we replant containers in spring, the beginning of summer, the end of summer into autumn, and at the end of autumn for the holidays.  Because who doesn’t love a beautiful container garden, whatever the season!

Happy gardening!