week 20: plotting
this week on the little dream farm
Last year I stumbled upon a rabbit hole I absolutely love going all.the.way.down.
Have you ever used Proven Winners’ Container Garden Recipe Search?
Oh. My friend.
Even if you’re not into gardening or you have someone else do your landscaping or you are just now getting your hands dirty and learning and trying…this is for you.
You navigate to it by going to Proven Winners site and in their main navigation menu click “Gardening Ideas” then click “Container Garden Ideas.”
They have other planning options for all different kinds of garden design, which I also highly recommend, but today I’ll briefly share with you the Container Garden aspect.
For the past two years, I simply went to a few of our local nurseries and picked out what I thought looked nice. Then I found this resource, and I’m now able to connect the ideas I have in my head with actual images and the plant names and container recipes to help me take what I have in my mind and make it come to life.
It’s like, “There! That’s it! That’s what I want to create!” That’s what this resource does for me and I hope it will for you, too.
I spent some time this week picking out recipes for the window boxes on the Lower Barn where the chicken coop is, some hanging basket recipes for the front porch, as well patio planter recipes for the three large planters on the deck.
What I’ll do is I’ll take these ideas, head back to my local nurseries, and use what they have on hand to put together recipes for each that look similar to the collections I’m sharing with you today. They won’t be exact, but they’ll be close.
To get you started, I thought I’d share my top picks for the three above categories since there are thousands of ideas to choose from.
The best part is that each recipe tells you exactly how many of each plant you need and even shows you how to place them in your container. Brilliant!
So here you are…some of my top picks for the coming season. I’ve included the name of the recipe in the caption of each section so you can easily search for it if you see ones here you love:
Window Boxes
Hanging Baskets
Patio Planters
Aren’t they such a dream? You’ll be sure to find lots of ideas that match your style and I hope you have fun using this resource and sharing it with your fellow gardeners!
As for this week on the farm—it feels like we packed an entire month into just one week.
A friend of mine said, “I thought you guys were slowing down on the farm this year,” and my reply was, “Yeah—this IS us slowing down!”
We’re just keeping up with the basic maintenance of the farm, which happens to be quite a lot and the very reason why we’re not adding anything new this year.
So this week our neighbors came by to till the Cut Flower Patch and load the donkey manure to use for their gardens. We have the Big Garden fully prepped and ready for fruit and veggie planting, which we’ll be doing this coming weekend. Pop came by and mowed the very front pasture and a nice swath around the donkey’s grazing pasture.
Sunday (today!) we’re picking up dahlia boxes and getting the Cut Flower Patch set up and ready for planting all the dahlia tubers, also next weekend.
Our Saturday Adventure took us all the way to Ithaca, NY, where we sipped the best London Fog and had an amazing breakfast from a little coffee shop on the way there in an old early 1900s firehouse turned coffee roaster. We hit the farmers market, spent a good while walking around the Cornell campus and visiting the Cornell Botanical Gardens, strolling around downtown Ithaca, enjoying an incredible Vietnamese lunch, driving around Ithaca College, and doing a little window shopping. We loved it!
Chris spent the first part of the week in Wisconsin for work and now this coming week I’ll head back to DC for another few days at the Pentagon.
The start and end of the growing season feels like there so much to do and never enough time or daylight to do it, but we know in just a few weeks once everything is in the ground and all our other annual seasonal projects are knocked out (I’ll share those on IG as we do them!) that we’ll be sitting back, relaxing, and enjoying the fruits of our labor, and spending lots more time at the lake and enjoying weekend adventures!
I hope you’ve been up to something you enjoy this weekend—catch me up with what’s going on in your neck of the woods if you’d like, or if you’d like to share what projects or planning or trips or weekend adventures you’ve got going on this year!
As always we’ll catch you right back here next Sunday for another weekly Farm Note. Sending you love and well wishes until then!
While we’re in all things gardening mode, here’s a few things we love:
These hanging flickering solar lanterns are gorgeous—we have six and they have the most beautiful warm light, a glowing ambiance, and they add so much to your outdoor space. I’ve kept them placed on a patio table, we’ve hung them from shepherd’s hooks, and they’d be great around a pool, pergola, or fire pit, too.
You’ll find this tree of life garden bench on our front porch and it’s better in person than I thought it might be. It’s not too heavy which makes it easy to move but not so light that it looks or feels cheap. It lends well to so many different kinds of spaces and makes for the perfect little place to take a load off.
These solar pathway lights line our front walkway in the summer months. They are a gorgeous warm color and the reflect the most lovely pattern onto the ground around it. These would be great along walkways or within your garden beds to light up your pretty landscaping.
The hanging baskets I picked have a thicker wire to them which I think helps the coconut husk lining hold up a lot better—we’ve not had to replace it across three growing seasons!
*Note: Not all, but some of these links are affiliate links. That’s no matter to you, as it costs you nothing. However, if you make a purchase, we -may- receive a teeny weeny commission.
What a great website - going to try and find something similar for the UK. I'm sure I can use some of the ideas though, thanks for sharing! Good news for me, some of your "can do" approach has rubbed off on me and I finally start a new job this week 😊I'm going to be working at an historical water mill that's open to the public. I'm looking forward to being a small part of the story of this beautiful building and sharing it with others. Thanks for being a source of inspiration, kindness and joy that makes nice things in life seem more possible xxx