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Monday, May 28, 2012

Plants, Pots, and a Post

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday weekend!

I had fun finishing up my planting for the spring.  I had quite a collection of old, somewhat icky, kitchen pans that I've gotten in odd boxes from auctions.  They really aren't good enough to cook anything in, but I didn't want to throw them away...so....

I decided to plant flowers them.  I had my husband drill several holes (just any random order) in the bottom of the pots.  I told him my planned use and showed him the post I stole from our gardening stash--I used an electric fence post.  (We've never used it for an electric fence.  We just bought them because they were cheap posts to use to stake tomato plants.)  Anyway, Trevor needed to know what size post I was using so that he could drill the holes the appropriate size.  He said that if I could be trusted with power tools, he would let me drill the holes myself...but my klutziness...

Once the holes were drilled, I used a sledgehammer to drive the post into the ground.  I took the largest pot and put it on first, making it the bottom pot.  I filled it with dirt and put flowers on one side of the pan.  I left the other side flowerless so that I could put on the next pan.  Keep working up until you run out of pans.
It didn't end up very tall -- three bigger pots and two little pots -- but it was big enough for me.  What do you think?  It's a different variation of what some people have done with clay pots.  However, I think the aluminum pots will last longer than the clay pots.

Along the same lines, I also used some colanders for hanging pots.  I used newspaper to kind of slow down the dirt from coming out the holes, but I think if I did it again, I'd probably use burlap just to give the pots/colanders a nicer look.
I hung some old spoons off the handles.  Trevor fashioned hangers from steel hangers...we get tons of these because he gets uniforms.  The uniform place won't take them back, and the recycling center won't take them...good grief!
I also did one "pot" from a large basket.  It is on an old sewing treadle.  All that was there was the iron treadle.  Trevor put some wood on the top and I had a plant stand.  On top of the plant stand are my herbs.
And, for my last little planting project / experiment...I put a metal basket upside down in the flower bed (filled with dirt) and then tucked in different sedum varieties in some of the holes.  My hope is that the sedum will fill in and spread...we'll see how that goes!


Have a great week, and take care of you!

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