Have you picked up your hanging baskets for spring and summer? If you’ve never grown flowers and plants in hanging planters before, make this your year to get started! Once you begin gardening with this ingenious method, you’ll soon learn why it continues to be a wildly popular choice for gardeners across the world.
What Are the Benefits of Hanging Baskets?
The concept of hanging baskets is pretty straightforward: you plant your plants in a pot suspended by a hook, then hang them up in a sunny spot. You might be surprised by the benefits of growing plants this way! Here’s why we love them and why we’re sure you’ll feel the same.
A Canopy of Color
For starters, hanging baskets are breathtakingly beautiful! Imagine lounging around your patio with colorful clouds of trailing flowers and foliage cascading all around you. Instead of keeping all your plants on the ground, you can double the visual impact of your garden by suspending your plants overhead. Gorgeous!
Saving Space
If your garden space is limited—or you don’t have a garden at all—you can hang your flowers and plants by your front entrance, the patio, or even an apartment balcony. Maximize your space by taking your plants off the ground and suspending them overhead—now you’ll have more room to entertain!
Experiment with Styles
Hanging baskets are ideal for planting annuals that won’t last through the winter, so it’s a great way to try new color schemes or exciting new flowers you’ve never grown. There are always plenty of new annual flowers released each year, with striking color combinations and unique features that catch your eye.
Flowers, Fruits, Veggies, and More!
Sure, you can grow plenty of pretty flowers in your hanging baskets—but that’s not all. You can also grow fruits like strawberries or vining vegetable plants like cherry tomatoes, mini cucumbers, or peppers. You can even grow trailing succulents like Burro’s Tail or String of Pearls!
How to Care for Your Hanging Baskets
Caring for hanging baskets is a bit different than what you’d expect with plants in a garden bed, but it certainly isn’t difficult. The important thing to consider is that the amount of soil in each container is limited, so you need to replenish the necessary resources for your plants to thrive continually.
During the hottest months of the year, you may need to water your hanging baskets every day. Ideally, you should water them early in the morning before the sun has heated up the soil. If your plants look tired and limp, that’s a sure sign that they need a top-up of moisture.
It’s important to regularly fertilize the plants in your hanging baskets as well, approximately once per month, depending on your chosen plants. Fast-growing annuals and edible plants need lots of nutrients to fuel their growth, and they’re going to soak up all the available supply in the soil. Enriching the soil with fertilizers and things like fish emulsion or compost tea will help keep your plants adequately nourished.
Depending on your chosen flowers, you need to deadhead the spent blooms to encourage reblooming or pinch off leggy vines to maintain a tidy shape. However, some popular flowers for hanging baskets, such as Calibrachoa, are self-cleaning and don’t require deadheading.
The Best Flowers for Hanging Baskets
Mounded and trailing plants are best for hanging baskets—you can plant one or an assortment of varieties! If you’re planting a mixed arrangement, place taller plants in the middle and trailing plants around the edge so they can spill down the sides.
Some of our favorite plants for hanging baskets include:
Petunias
Calibrachoa
Lobelia
Creeping Jenny
Coleus
Tradescantia
Nemesia
Begonia
Fuchsia
Bacopa
Verbena
Cherry Tomatoes
Strawberries
Whether you’d like to customize your own hanging baskets in Pennsylvania or purchase them pre-made, we have everything you need here at Lehigh Valley Home & Garden! Our staff can answer any other questions you may have about how to care for your new plantings.