it is fall in north carolina and i am so excited to get my window boxes
planted for this season with all of this gorgeous fall color
stay tuned
hello friends welcome to gardening with creekside i am jenny and today we have a
very fun little project we are switching out the window boxes
for the fall planting if you will remember back
in late spring early summer we did a gorgeous arrangement
of some summer plantings here in the window boxes we used caladiums and
browallia and sweet potato vine all good things
well they did amazingly well because this was our first season doing
window boxes so i was a little unsure how everything would go
they did great we have two window boxes that are from the kinsman garden company
absolutely love these things they are amazing so if you are looking to get
some window boxes i highly suggest that you go over to
their website and check it out because they are extremely
high quality one thing that i was really impressed about was when i went
to go remove my summer plantings out of these window
boxes is that the cocoa liners were still in great shape
i know in the past that i have when i take out those summer plantings
i just lose my cocoa liner it just shreds and falls apart
these held up amazingly well and so i'm reusing them for this
season we are standing here in our shade garden bed and you will
notice that it looks very different than the last time
we were here i went ahead and did some fall cleanup
i pulled out all the annuals i trimmed back a bunch of the perennials if you
remember this is where the lady in red ferns were they got
whacked back everything has just been kind of cleaned
up and yes it's a little i won't say depressing but it's you know
a little sad it's ready to go to bed for the winter i
have some work though to do in this bed before i'm ready to put it to bed for
the winter like i'm going to move some things around
rearrange and then add fresh mulch so this is the perfect time to go ahead and
do these window boxes because i can freely move around this
hydrangea and not trample anything that's underneath my
feet or mess up my nice clean mulch now i've already gone ahead and done
the window box underneath the kitchen sink window so if you will remember that
great half moon window box is underneath our kitchen
sink window and it is really a high a lot
higher than this one is this one you get to see
nice and down low great depth up here but in the kitchen
sink i'm really looking down on it so i did not i used a lot of low
lying plants and then those pansies will trail
over here though we can do lots of height
and i'm going to mimic and repeat some of those same colors and the exact same
plants i've already got in here brand new fresh
soil you know that i preach every time that
you put in a new container take out all of that old dirt and bring
in new soil remember back in the summer this
thing was chock full of plants so when i removed
them the soil even though some of the soil was still in there
it was chocked full of roots we have roots we had snail and slug issues this
summer so they could have stayed in there i wanted all of that
all dirt out nice fresh fluffy dirt i use the espoma potting soil and
i'm going to top dress it with the land and sea compost
to give them just an all natural fertilizer so i'm not going to put any
kind of synthetic fertilizer in here you could but i'm just going to use that
so we have got three ornamental red kale that is in the
back that are in the back that was not proper
english i do apologize so this is going to give me some height
in this bed um it's a little break up the
roots just a little bit i don't always break up my roots
just only if they're looking a little tight that was looking a little tight so
i went ahead and then make sure that you always
cover all of your roots with soil you don't want to bury these
super crazy deep you just need all the roots to be covered
in soil you don't want any air pockets because that's how your roots
get nutrients is from that soil now we're going to
center this guy there we go backfill and then one on the end this
should go pretty fast i somewhat have an idea of how this is
going to be laid out not exactly but you know
just go with the flow when you're doing it
so i put one on each end one in the center to kind of anchor
the bed now for some more foliage and some really a contrast of
color i'm going to use
dusty miller dusty miller is a fantastic foliage plant
gorgeous green silver foliage it's very kind of it reminds me of
seaweed almost like a really neat unique foliage and i think i'm gonna put
two between each of the kale because they
are small for right now now you know me usually i am all about
oh let's watch it grow and develop you know don't really jam pack it in but
this is fall going into winter and i want to get my
most bang for my buck right now i'm not
honestly sure how well this dusty miller is going to go throughout
the whole season again this is our first fall winter
season
with these window boxes so it's it's a little bit of an experiment like i
learned a lot from my summer planting
for example you will notice that my hydrangea maybe you can notice maybe you
can't in the back the leaves the stems are
almost really pointing this way because my plants in here were so
vigorous especially that um sweet potato vine i mean the whole
section was covered and it was really going into that hydrangea so it was
blocking out the sun for my hydrangea so next year i have
made a note in my gardening journal not
probably to put that sweet potato vine back right there because it was just
such a vigorous grower that it really started to hamper
how my hydrangea was growing and i do not want that
now what we're going to do now is going to
chalk this full of these sweet violas so we have a gorgeous deep
deep purple one and a beautiful white one with a little bit of a blue
purple center so we're just gonna come in here and
we're gonna alternate
colors i do have some ivy
that i'm going to put in here
as my trailer so i'm going to leave a little bit of room to tuck
those guys in here but i went with kind of the purple
white theme here
and it's repeated in both of the boxes let's see
somebody here and i like when i don't know exactly how i'm going to lay out
the window box i like to go ahead and put them out
while they're still in the containers that way it's really kind of easy to go
ahead and move stuff around without being planted
i've lost my ivy is that my feet so we're going to alternate
a nice solid ivy i think you know what i'm just going to
switch it up see this is that last minute little decision here so
the solid green ivy gets it's a little bit too lost so i have
variegated ivy now it's it's a little bit smaller right now but
i think it'll do better in the long run
as far as kind of popping out and being standing out as opposed to just the
solid green ivy we'll stick those right there all in all
that looks good if i have holes i can always go back and fill in some more
pansies violas now why did i choose violas
instead of pansies well violas are more shape tolerant than
pansies pansies really like to have like lots and lots of sun to get your
flowers violas are still
plants but they are more shade adaptable and
as i've told you before
this is a shade bed now i think i'm going to need some more
soil in here so i'll grab some here in just a second
so as you go through and you see that you need some more soil
just add it in you don't want your plants to
sunk down in your container you want them up a little bit and i was feeling
like i was sinking down you know it's not gardening until you
get dirty we're getting dirty in here
all right so i'm just going to go along and get the rest of these planted and
then we'll check back here together in a second
okay so everybody is planted everybody has
lots of great soil all around their root system but what i'm going to do is i'm
going to go back and add just a little bit
of the espoma's land and sea compost to the top i'm just going to kind of top
dress it why am i doing that and why am i not
going to use a slow release fertilizer you know how much we love the proven
winter slow release fertilizer for our flowering annuals well that
fertilizer is released by the heat obviously
in the fall and the winter we're not going to have a whole lot of heat
so it's really just kind of a waste on my part to use that
fertilizer that time release fertilizer in
that container so that's why we're going to use
some great compost it is fantastic when to use
in your landscape so when i come back in a week or a couple of weeks
and i rework this bed and i dig up my perennials and i move them
i will use that land to see compost in my bed also i will
top dress the whole bed to give this area lots of great
nutrients my hydrangeas don't really like to be
fertilized with you know synthetic
fertilizers constantly they don't like that but they do
love great rich nutrient-rich soil so that compost will be great for them
so that's just a little side note for you
and you'll notice that i'm using my um proven winners
water soluble container it makes a great little bucket
i have used this thing for all sorts of different chores around the house
it's great for doing bird seed filling up bird
feeders so don't if you if you get these great little tubs that the water soluble
fertilizer comes in hang on to them they're great i had one
of our subscribers talk about how she saved hers and then
i think it was her grandkids or maybe it was kids in the neighborhood who came
through for trick-or-treating and they didn't have a bucket
so she saved all her little water-soluble
fertilizer buckets you know clean them up of course
they weren't full of fertilizer and um gave them to the kids
to use as their trick-or-treat containers and i thought that was just a
great idea you know what a great way to recycle
these great little containers all right so everybody has a nice little
layer of compost on them and you know me let me
find my bucket where's my bucket my bucket's over there
and we're going to top dress this with some
mulch one again it helps insulate the roots
it makes it look pretty it keeps water from splattering
onto your plants and getting them dirty so it's just a nice way
to top dress your container you can really use whatever mulch
that you find that works best this is just what we have here at the nursery
it's what we use in all of our flower beds and when we do landscapes
that kind of thing it's a
hardwood mulch it's been dyed brown makes an absolutely gorgeous
bed when you use it in your flower beds it's what i will use in this bed
once i get this area all cleaned up and the perennials moved
the neighborhood dogs are coming to say hello they're up in the woods
i don't think you can see them in the window but if you see a
big dog running by it's okay it's just the neighbors
they're friendly
so everybody's going to get tucked in here it's going to look really great
looking out from the kitchen window out on here
because inside this is a pretty low window it's only i don't know
18 inches off the ground inside so you can really look down
in this bed and it's really pretty so everybody's getting nice tucked in
winter blanket for them they're going to be nice and happy
now as far as watering how am i going to water this how am i going to maintain
this through the winter it is underneath the
eve of the house so i really will have to kind of watch
it because it could dry out this is not on
irrigation we might put this on a drip irrigation
next spring but even if it we did in the winter time it wouldn't be
running you just don't want to have to fight that the possibility of it
freezing one night and so forth but everybody is nice and
tucked in everybody is happy all of
the window boxes are done and i am loving it
of course we will keep you updated on how they do and how they
go through the winter as always thank you so much for gardening with creekside
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bye friends