Planting Pots with Cut Flowers, Adding Refrigeration to the Flower Stand!

Well hey there friends! I hope you're having a great day out there in your gardens. I'm really excited for today's video. We're going to be planting up the Henry Studio pots for the summer season. I did have pansies, violas, and cascading hydrangeas in the pots but you know it just wasn't really working out. So today I went to a brand new nursery that I've never been to before and I picked up some fun things for the pollinators and also some things that the hummingbirds love that also can be used as cut flowers. So in the smallest pot I think what I want to do are these beautiful straw flowers. So let's see what these are called. Grand Via, I guess that's the company, Grand Via Pink. 18 to 30 inches tall and 18 to 24 inches wide. And since the foliage of straw flower is a little bit unsightly in my personal opinion, I think I'm going to go around it with this purple ornamental pepper just to help disguise some of that yellow foliage that can happen at the bottom of straw flowers. Now in the biggest pot I put three Mexican bush sage plants. I think I'm going to make that spacing a little bit wider but what I want to do is go in between those with this gorgeous light pink Nicotiana. Oh my goodness, isn't that amazing? I was so happy they had Nicotiana and I think we might have some leftover. Now here's what I'm not sure about yet. I have some of this white ivy trailing geranium in the raised beds and I originally bought two more just to add them into the raised beds but now I'm thinking maybe we pop them in here next to this pinky winky agastache that I got the other day. Here's a look at the tags before we head back over. We've got purple flash ornamental pepper, we had the pink straw flower, we have a Nicotiana called misty dawn, pinky pie hummingbird mint aka agastache, and we've got cascade white trailing ivy geranium. It's so beautiful out today. So sunny but also nice and cool and windy. All right, let's get to work. It's so bright right now that it's probably hard to see but here is that amazing pinky pie agastache. Light pink florets followed by these beautiful peach florets. We've got the trailing geranium, pink straw flower, and I love the purple flowers on the ornamental pepper plant before it develops the peppers. Here's a pepper right here. We've got our Nicotiana which will bloom in probably about two weeks and then the Mexican bush sage which I don't expect to bloom until late September, early October. Oh it's so much fun to plant in containers. It's a few hours later and I just got home from having lunch with my husband. Now I still need to blow off the book nook because we've got a lot of dirt around but I did get everything watered in before I left. I have to tell you I love this combination of plants for a lot of reasons. First of all, we can cut from them if we want to. The Nicotiana will bloom in just a few weeks and we'll have that great tubular flower much later on in the growing season in the fall. The Mexican bush sage will bloom. That's a beautiful purple spiky flower. Of course we can cut the straw flower whenever we want and then we have this wonderful new perennial that we can pop into the landscape in the fall. You know what else I really like about these planters? They are going to produce a lifetime worth of seeds. I hesitated there because I thought am I really saying something accurate here but I think so because when you think about it each straw flower head produces approximately 500 seeds and each bloom of a Nicotiana plant produces upwards of 3,000 seeds. So I think I spent approximately $100 on all the plants for the six pots and you know what that is a big investment. I could take my whole family out to dinner for that amount of money but I feel a little bit better since I used plants that are either going into the landscape or I can propagate them really easy like this Mexican bush sage. We can propagate that very easily from cuttings or I can do seed collection in the fall. I cut some gorgeous Gadsby Gal Oakleaf Hydrangea, the Potomac Lavender Snapdragons, Princess Charlene DeMonaco Roses. We have the gorgeous Rosella's Dream Roses. I'm sorry Rosella's Dream Lilies, Bells of Ireland, Magic Lime Green Feverfew, Silvery Rose Strawflower, and then just a little bit of Buplerum. I just love that it ties in the colors nicely don't you think? All right I'm going to see you guys tomorrow when we set up the flower stand and I have some exciting news. We have a refrigerator that is working at the stand. I'll see you tomorrow. Isn't it so exciting to have refrigeration at the stand? I just picked up that refrigerator on Amazon. I originally purchased it when I did the wedding recital and I needed to hold a bunch of PMEs over but it serves an even greater purpose at the flower stand now. Friends I need your help. This is Marble Arch Salvia and I am not sure when to cut it. I'm assuming I'm supposed to wait for all of these flowers to fall off and maybe more bracts appear. I'm not really sure but can you let me know how many more bracts I can expect to see before these will hold well in the vase. All right friends we're going to continue to change things over here in the raised bed gardens as I continue to finish up these two rounds of lilies. You can see over here we now have Eastern Moon Lily just coming into bloom so we'll be able to cut these next but I think what I want to do is come over top of these silt lilies with saponaria so I'll go ahead and do that this evening but I'm going to wrap up today's video here because I do want to film a hydrangea garden tour for you. I want to wish you a fabulous day out there in your gardens and of course I'll see you sometime back here at North Lawn real soon. Bye friends!