By admin 
If you love to plant summer planters, you’re in the right place today! I got mine planted about a month ago and they are growing well, so I’ll share the plants I got as well as how they are looking after a month. I have always loved planting summer annuals, but not particularly in the ground. I love those too, but they are a lot more work to keep going and having planters around our pool really adds to the summer ambience in our backyard.
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see our disclosure policy.
I forgot to take pics before I got everything planted, but here’s what I bought this year. I love shades of pink, so that’s what I usually do in my backyard planters. Pink just works together and combined with green shades, it’s a winner! I bought pink vinca, pink and green caladiums, pink and green coleus (the shorter spiky leaves below), pink rio dipladenia, a Cordyline Terminalis in the middle and a few others I’ll show below.
I bought 3 of each of these (mostly) since I have 3 larger planters. I have these 2 square planters and one round one and they are all gray in color. I like to plant a taller one in the middle with shorter to the sides, as well as a spiller. You’ve probably heard thriller, filler, and spiller when it comes to planting plants? It does work, although I don’t have a real spiller on these, but when they fill out you get different heights and the caladiums reach out to the sides, as do the Rios.
I also added some pink hued annuals to my smaller pots, these are portulaca and celosia.
More vinca in this pot. These are easy care plants and do well in sun or part shade and they bloom all summer.
These pots are filling out too! I added a vinca in here too.
Looks great right after planting, but after it fills out more, it’s even better as you will see below. You can see how the paint is chipping on my old planters. I did get the spray paint out to touch them up for this year.
The round planter with Cordyline, caladiums, Rio, and some Creeping Jenny that always comes back. It’s a good filler for a container.
The square planters right after planting. You can see my planters are not in great shape. I have had these square planters for 10 years at least and when we got the pool installed I spray painted them gray, but they aren’t holding up well, so I just bought these new gray plastic planters from Lowes that are self watering (they have a compartment at the bottom that holds water and you don’t have to water as often. Unfortunately the spray paint just doesn’t hold up forever outdoors. The new ones will be great when I plant next year. I’ll make do with these for this year and change them both out next year. Here are the planters I ordered in case you’re interested:
Square Gray planter from Lowes – These are 20″ x 20″ which is the same size I already had.
And for the first time ever, Mark and I planted a container garden. He had ordered this one from Amazon about 3 years ago and we never got around to planting it until this year. We bought Parks Whopper, Rutgers, Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes, as well as basil and oregano in this bed.
I have a basil on the deck and one in the container garden since we love basil so much during summer.
You can see the patio all cleaned up below. It didn’t look like this before we started and every year we have to pressure wash the patio and everything down here to clean it all up. That’s about a 2 day project at least. But for now, it’s clean again and we are so happy to be in our backyard once more. My blue hydrangeas are doing great and blooming now. The white ones in the middle bloom a little later. You can see the container garden up above by the fence. That’s the only place we could put it with our sloping backyard and proximity to sun. It gets about 1/2 day of sun, so we hope it’s enough.
Here are the containers after a month of growing. I’m loving how they are filling out and look so lush now. We’ve gotten plenty of rain so I have hardly had to water them.
I love the pink and green combo, this look is what attracts me every year when I’m choosing plants and flowers. So don’t forget that you don’t have to do all flowers to make a container work. Sometimes just colorful leaves are a great complement to flowers. That’s why I love caladiums so much.
The only flowers I have in here are the vinca and Rio. I’m really loving the Cordyline this year, so I’m going to make a note to look for that again. Those vivid pink leaves coming out of the middle are so pretty.
The planters sure do make me happy during summer months!
And so do these hydrangeas!
After a freeze 2 years ago, they are coming back strong. I will definitely be cutting some to bring inside the house.
I’m so glad we can grow hydrangeas here.
And the little garden of tomatoes is growing too, we have 2 little ones now. Fingers crossed that we can produce more tomatoes this year.
My daddy would be proud! Wish I could show him and get some tips.
We sure hope to get our own crop of homegrown tomatoes this year, that sure would be nice. We are always out looking for tomatoes during the summer.
I love these coleus too, they are a different variety from what I’ve gotten before and I love the shape and colors. Grandkids in the pool last weekend.
That’s how I put my planters together and this shows how well they are doing now.
They are gorgeous if I do say so myself!
So that’s a look at the backyard blooms this year. We plan to be out here a lot!
In the front yard, I needed to fill in some bare spots where we had inherited knockout roses that got some kind of disease and died, so we cut them down. I added 3 of these pink and gold spirea and I hope they do well. So far so good. There’s a clematis vine in the back and Mark took down the old metal screen that they were climbing on, so I got a new metal obelisk for them to climb and I really like it. It was from Amazon.
So that’s a look at how I put my summer annual planters together and we enjoy them all the way til fall when the first frost comes along. I hope this gives you ideas of your own for planting beautiful blooms each summer!
Related
Don’t Miss a Post, join my list!