Gardening Videos- Hanging Basket

Hanging baskets are one of the best ways to bring immediate color to areas of your home and garden, where growing plants in the conventional way may be difficult. When placed by the entrance door, they can add a welcoming note for visitors, or to bring color to shadier areas. It's just a matter of providing a suitable bracket from which to hang the basket.

Choosing a Place To Hang Your Plants
As with all planting, you should consider the conditions of the area where the basket is intended to hang, before choosing your plants.  Do remember that even a small basket, when filled with potting compost and well watered, weighs a great deal. So make sure your bracket is firmly fixed to the wall . Special anchor bolts, rather than simply a screw and a plastic wall plug are the order of the day.

If your basket is intended to brighten up a shady area, you should consider using a fuchsia as the centerpiece for height and surrounding it with shade tolerant plants such as impatiens, otherwise known as "Busy Lizzy". This plant originates on the floor of tropical rain forests. From this, you can understand the conditions it likes best: warmth, plenty of moisture and not over-bright conditions. For planting in the sides of the basket, trailing lobelia is ideal, as it tolerates both sunshine and shade.

If you are planting for an area that gets a lot of sun, you should use a geranium for your height giving central plant and under plant with petunias. When established these will tend to spill over the sides of the basket, although you should also plant the sides of the basket with contrasting lobelia.

No plants give of their best in windy conditions and by hanging up there in mid air, hanging baskets are at more risk of windy conditions than plants at ground level. Although hanging baskets can tolerate a certain amount of wind without detriment, do avoid areas that are prone to wind. For example, sometimes two buildings together tend to take on the conditions of a wind tunnel and amplify the windy conditions.

Trailing lobelia, in particular, does not like wind and, if you find the tips of this plant turning brown, too much wind is probably the cause.

In order to get the maximum flowers from your baskets you should make sure they never dry out and have an adequate supply of high potash fertilizer. You can give them this by either mixing a slow release fertilizer in the compost, along with some moisture retaining crystals, or you can give them a liquid feed of a high potash fertilizer as recommended by the maker's instructions.

You should water the baskets as often as once a day in very sunny or windy conditions. You might find baskets in shadier, sheltered areas can go a bit longer between watering, although the fuchsia/ impatiens shade basket will appreciate being sprayed with a fine mist of water on hot days -- provided the sun is not shining directly on them.

Dead head your plants regularly, to encourage more flowers, and you will be rewarded with a very long season of continuous color.