104 | Trellis Hanging Pots

Today I’ll be potting up some colourful hanging pots for the trellis in the back garden. I initially wanted to transform the trellis into a kitchen garden where I could grow herbs. Then I wanted to try creating a “living wall” but couldn’t justify the cost to create it. Instead, I used summer annuals and foliage plants to create a charming vertical flowerbed.

Trellis location

The wooden trellis is installed on a north facing wall and is in full shade for most of the day. It only receives about an hour of early morning sunshine daily meaning I’m seriously limited with what I can grow there. It looks onto the garden and it’s full effect can only be appreciated when you’re on the patio or lawn areas. The whole of that area can look pretty bare if there are no plants in situ. The initial plan was to grow herbs and make it a little kitchen garden - a project I’m yet to try though I’m not sure how well they’ll fair in a shady area.

Plants that thrive in full shade

There are many areas in the back garden that would be considered as full shade areas. We have a few large sycamore trees overhead and quite a few smaller trees that were planted in the landscape so I already previously researched plants that can grow in full shade:

• Astilbe | beautiful plumes that comes in pink, red, white and purple colours
• Anemone | 
• Busy Lizzie | one of the few plants that can happily grow in full shade yet produce inning vibrant flowers in shades of pink, red, white and orange.
• Fern | 
• Coleus | 
• Creeping Jenny | 
• Ivy | 
• Climbing Rose | 

The problem with many of those plants are that they grow quite large so would be unsuitable for growing in tiny pots.

Turning rejects into the main attraction 

Advice given by pro gardeners is to get rid of weaker seedlings in favour of the stronger bigger seedlings. As I was growing my plants I had this thought in the back of my mind but I couldn’t bear to discard the smaller seedlings so kept nurturing them in the hopes that they would “catch up” with the others. They never did. I didn’t have this trellis project in mind yet but it would turn out that those small busy lizzies and petunias would become the main attractions for the trellis. 

Miniature Busy Lizzie | “Rosa”

Busy lizzies can grow to

Petunias can

However, these little plants were the perfect size to fit into the pots and my theory was that if I kept pruning them back, they should remain a suitable size for the entire season.

Potting up

The pots didn’t have drainage holes so the first thing I had to do was drill some holes in the bottom. I opted for a 1/4 inch drill bit and created 5 holes in each pot. Then I mixed some potting up soil and potted up 3 remaining busy lizzies and a petunia. I left the remaining pots for another project - attempting to air layer a Creeping Jenny plant.

The end product 

I ended up with a trellis filled with beautiful full sized blooms on mini versions of some of my favourite go-to summer annuals. I’m not sure if this process is repeatable or if it was cheer luck but I’ll be sure to take extra care of my mini seedlings from now on.

For updates (if any) on this specific project, type “104” in the search box at the top of the page.

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Notes

Shots needed:

• Morning sun shining in empty trellis
• Compas showing trellis location 
• Comparison shit if purple petunia in sun vs in shade