Planting a pair of fall containers 🍂 🍁

Well it's a beautiful warm sunny day here but I'm still going to be making a couple of fall containers. I do like to change over, not all my pots certainly, but a couple of pots for fall just to kind of carry me in until we can get to the holiday containers because there's a bit of a stretch there where it's really sad to have nothing in containers. And what I've learned over the years is the time to do it is before you think you should do it. So I'm only going to do two containers this year. One of them is the urn that's behind me. If you watched my grading my container report card video you'll know that this container did not turn out at all how I had hoped it would. So it was a really good one to consider to just get everything out of there and start fresh and have something new for fall in there. I did save the meleanthus that was in there. I have potted that up. It's living outside for the time being but the plan is to put that in the unheated garage for winter. I think it's a zone seven plant so I'm hoping it'll be warm enough in the garage to overwinter that. It's an experiment. I figured there's nothing to lose right? So that has been potted up and taken out of there and there was a one or two bromeliads in there. I did pot those up too. Everything else hit the compost pile. So let me show you what we're working with and then we're going to just get this one planted first and then I'll show you the other planter that we're going to do. Okay here's the assortment of plants that I have here. Purple fountain grass that's a nice fresh one that is will not flower this year. I think it's well maybe you never know it's probably too late for it to flower. An aster, a couple of marigolds. That is a color combination that I would not normally be into but it's fall so we do what we do. One big kale and some smaller ones little four pack smaller ones and then I have a few heucheras as well. Oh and there's some ornamental peppers in there and then we also have pumpkins. Not necessarily all of this will go in this pot but knowing me a lot of it will. So this is I usually approach from the back on this it's just easier because as you can see all the dahlias are planted up there so it's a little easier to get this way and since the rabbits ate most of the hardy plumbago that I planted here there's plenty of room to walk here so that was really nice of them. I've already topped this up I pulled out all the soil that was full of roots and I've topped this up with fresh potting mix so I think we are good to go. I did put a lot of potting mix in this because I want to be able to lay some of the kale on their side so this is quite quite full. Like so full I can't even actually get this in there. There we go. One of the reasons I like to put pumpkins in planters is because squirrels don't get them that way or the chipmunks or whoever it is who eats holes in pumpkins. I just bought some of these today at the nursery not all of them but some of them and everything is so dry I should have watered these before they're going in here I didn't realize how dry they would be and I tell you you can tell when the garden centers lose their their staff for the season because boy plants end up really dry and I get it like they're you know all their staff or a lot of their staff has undoubtedly gone back to college and stuff or they've got seasonal staff who are not there right now. This is called Believer Purple Aster. These heucheras were half price at the big box store because they are they had half off all perennials. Some of the things are a little shrouded right now but the more we get into fall the more important it is that this looks good 360 because of course perennials will be dying back and annuals will be cut out of there and the dahlias will be gone and shrubs will lose their leaves so I think I've jammed as much as we can in there. I'm happy with it let's move on to the next. So the next one I'm going to do here is this low teak planter by the back door. You know when I do these seasonal containers I like to do the ones that we see the most. There's no point in doing containers you know in areas that we're not walking by in fall and winter. I have left some of the plants that were in here here and that includes this Lamandra Platinum Beauty which is not hardy here it's this beautiful grass but that will look good the entirety of this season so there's no reason to take that out. There are also strawberries kind of growing on the edge which I've left those and I hope to just leave those in all year so that they will come back next year. And then there is some of the Bellissima Ornamental Oregano and Kent Beauty Ornamental Oregano left. I lost one of those so I'm going to leave those two or two. Those will sort of they still look good they will fade out they'll brown they might actually be pretty I can always pull those out anytime. Then I also have I think this is a Dippledinia that didn't really get a chance to shine in this pot because it was so crowded in there so I figured there's a chance that maybe maybe it'll bloom a little bit. So for this one I'm going very seasonal feeling. We're going to start with like this enormous very bright orange pumpkin. We'll sit back here. I did not use the marigolds in the last container. I also had big marigolds so I'm going to pop marigolds in on either. We're going to go we're going fully orange on this guy but I figure if you can't go orange you know at this time of the year when can you right? Okay let's grab some cabbage. Is this cabbage or kale? This must be cabbage. A bit of a root ball that I missed when I was cleaning this out. Now this is very much unlike me. I did buy two mums. I kind of detest mums. These were pretty cheap and I thought maybe I can maybe I can handle two mums and these are orange as well. Not sure about the pumpkin stack but play that one by ear. Okay now I think I used the two marigolds that I didn't use in the other pot here in the front. Sometimes when I have a pumpkin in a pot I like to try to stick one of the plastic pots underneath it to sort of help. I mean even if it gets crushed to kind of help keep it up so it doesn't sort of sink into the pot and I think that one could be right on the edge and be okay. So there's one more thing I can do with this so I'm gonna do it and then you guys are gonna tell me if I should have done it or not because I can always undo it. Okay so I've added in this grapevine. I'm not sure I should have. It can easily come out. You let me know in the comments whether you think it should be there or not. I think it looks good. It's very orange. That's okay. This season is supposed to be orange right? I don't know. I like it. Considering we have to keep some things in there I think it's okay. Alright I used every plant that I bought for this project. I have two containers. I'm very happy with both of them. I don't feel the need to have any more than this. I feel like I've got some containers that are going to carry me into fall. I'm liking it. Okay hope you enjoyed watching that. We'll see how these containers age. You can follow along by subscribing and we'll see where it goes from here. It'll be good. I will be very thankful that I have these containers in a few weeks when everything is looking terrible around here. Alright have a great day in your garden. We'll see you soon. Thanks for watching.