A well-chosen shed will add beauty to your yard, but there are things you can do to dress it up for even more appeal. If your shed has window boxes, the possibilities are endless for year-round accessorizing with plants and other decorations.
Autumn calls for seasonal plants such as mums and asters, with small gourds tucked in between to add some whimsy. In the winter, you can arrange evergreen branches in your window boxes, with ornaments, red or gold ribbons, and other festive accessories as accents. But the automatic choice for spring and summer is to plant annual flowers in the boxes. You can keep it simple with one variety – say, the classic red geranium – or raise the dramatic effect with a blend of flower types, colors, and even textures. Playing off your shed’s finish by choosing floral colors that complement it can also work very well. If your house has window boxes as well, you can go for a put-together look by planting the same flower varieties in those boxes. Depending on how much plant care (annual flowers will need to be watered most days that it doesn’t rain) you’re willing to commit to, you can extend the planting to containers throughout the yard.
Planning Container Gardens for a Stunning Effect
Maybe you don’t fancy yourself much of a garden planner, but fear not: there’s a fun rule of thumb that can help anyone look like they’re a natural at creating container gardens that look like art. Just choose three categories of plants: a filler, a spiller, and a thriller. A filler can be just about any flower with good color that grows in a mounding fashion and spreads a bit across the dirt: marigolds, geraniums, portulaca, ageratum, scaevola, euphorbia, and some kinds of petunia. The thriller will be taller (aim for at least 10 or 12 inches) and should be placed in the middle of the window box or container. Some great choices are salvia, Angelonia, snapdragons, and a few of the more compact annual ornamental grasses.
The spillers are the champions of the window box, adding the lovely, soft effect of cascading color and texture. Some plants – such as sweet potato vine and certain types of petunia that have been developed to cascade – will grow longer and hang lower over the edge than others. Annuals like ivy geraniums, calibrachoa, and bacopa are excellent spiller options. Sweet potato vine (Ipomoea) comes in colors that range from pale yellow-green to deep burgundy, with some varieties boasting purple flowers or tri-colored leaves for added drama.
Container Garden Care
Your window boxes or other container plantings will look their best with a little extra care. Fertilize them once a month, and pinch off dead blooms if the varieties you choose aren’t self-deadheading. Sometimes a heat wave can wreak havoc on annual flowers, even if you’ve kept up with watering, or the plants can hit a mid-season slump where they aren’t flowering as well as they had before. When that happens, give them a boost by cutting them back a bit and feeding them with a more diluted fertilizer mix. That should renew their flowering activity for the rest of the season, while also giving them a neater look with a little reshaping.
If you’re new to this type of gardening, don’t worry about making mistakes. After all, that’s how you learn what to do for better results next time. Take notes on what worked and what wasn’t so great, and use that information next spring when you’re choosing your plants.
