Some pretty plants join the party

I bought more plants last week.

Yes, yes. I left work Thursday night. Brian was hanging out with a friend, so I went to Walmart to look at what they had.

Things were bought. Things were not regretted.

ANYWAY! I put a lot of my new plants into pots Monday. The herb tower is now a thing and I have two new flowers to join my old daisy (which also got a new, roomier, better-soil home).

I started by bringing everyone outside and test-driving a couple pots.

First I wanted to work on the herb tower. I only bought three live herbs: lavender, sweet mint and rosemary. There is also a packet of chives seeds that I haven't yet attempted to do anything with.

You may have noticed the pots full of bottle caps in some of my other photos. My mom alwasy taught me to add rocks to the bottom of a pot for drainage for plants. Living in apartments the last few years, rocks weren't always easy to find. But I drank a lot of sodas.

Exhibit A.

I started saving caps from soda, shampoo, milk, juice and coffee creamer bottles, as well as whole empty energy shot and liquid water enhancer bottles. They are a good, lightweight option to add a drainage element for container plants when rocks aren't easy to come by. I guess it's also kind of a "green" option, but that wasn't my thought process at the time.

Anyway, I put a layer of the plastic bottles at the bottom of a large terra cotta pot. I filled it with the potting soil I also bought at Walmart (mixed with the less-good soil from old plants), then checked to see where a smaller clay pot would fit on top of it.

It was originally going to be centered.

Then I actually read the instructions on the lavender and mint peat pots. They said to remove the bottoms of the pot and leave the pieces in the hole that the plant was going into. I used a pocket knife to carefully rip off the bottom of the pots.

 After I got them into the edge of the large pot, I decided that placing the second pot, where the rosemary would go, a little off-center would look better and leave some more room in the bottom. So that's what happened.

View from above.

 I put the rosemary, which didn't come in a peat pot, into the top and admired the work. I think it came out looking pretty sweet.

Like I said, I also bought some chives seeds, and I'm trying to figure out if I want to put them in the spaces of the herb tower seen here, or give them a separate place to call home.

But with the herbs done, I moved on to the two flowers I bought.

I'm not usually an ornamental-plant type of person, but these two had really pretty purple flowers and one was kind of a trailing type of flower that was also labeled to be heat tolerant. It was an easy sell.

The last hanging pot I had was buried in the garage, but it had a built-in drainage tray, so I didn't have to use more bottle caps. :-)

When I pulled the plant out of its plastic pot, it looked like this:

I know a lot of store-bought plants are cramped in their pots, but I always feel kind of bad when I see how crowded they get. The roots were too tight together to really pull apart any (I tried), so I just had to make sure it had room to spread out in the new pot.

I'm so enamored with these kinds of plants.

Next came the delphinium. These were on display outside the garden center and I literally spent a few seconds lusting after the blooms the way most girls would lust after shoes. Just look at the blue-on-purple color scheme going on here.

It reminds me of those galaxy pictures you see online.

I didn't take photos of the repotting of this one. I'm sure you get the idea by now. Plus I was listening to a YouTube playlist on my phone and you may know how the music stops if you try to do anything else, like take a picture.

 Since I was on such a roll, I also brought out the old sweet potato vine (I'm thinking it's dead, but not entirely sure) and my gerbera daisy to join the fun.

Gerbera daisies are supposed to be one-year plants, but I've had mine for three now. I bring it in in the winter, where its green leaves whither and die off, but new green sprouts come up. It was sending up some new greenery when I realized how slowly it was growing. It has been in the same pot for a while now, so I moved it to a larger home and replaced the old, tired soil with some fresh stuff.

It kind of looks like size overkill, but trust me, this daisy can get pretty big.

The rest of my plants are still doing well. The garlic got some fertilizer and the pepper sprouts, celery and mystery bulb get water regularly. Once the roots start showing at the bottom of the pots for the pepper sprouts, I'll move them to the garden bed, where I hope to see them flourish. The final step I need to finish before moving anything to the ground is adding some compost to that soil. I will also need to get the radish and pumpkin seeds started, and buy a banana pepper plant for Brian. I'm still contemplating tomato plants, but that can wait, as they won't be starting from seed.

Also! Speaking of mystery plants (the bulb hasn't changed much on the surface) the mystery sprout I put in the corner of the garlic pot poked above ground!

What ARE you???

I hope everyone else's spring projects are shaping up, if you have any. And in case anyone has any misinformed thoughts that gardening or repotting are clean activities, I'll leave you with this reminder that it's easy to take photos of only the good-looking angle and results

Here's to a happy, green spring for everyone. May you be as happy this season as Acer was laying in and nibbling on the grass while I was working.