Revisiting TFS

Great news!  We are not moving!  We will get to stay in our apartment for one more year.....  which means one more year in my lovely patio, gardening!  I appreciate my garden that much more, having faced the prospect of losing the opportunity to garden!

Well, as soon as I found this out, I did not waste any time.  Last week my front stoop got a much needed makeover.  You may remember our "thriller filler spiller" pot from last June.

If you don't, here is what it started of as:

Very cute

It turned into this:

A bit overgrown

Which turned into this:

Disaster

Now there are a few things going wrong here.

1) The "thriller" fuchsia plant, instead of growing out and full, turned "leggy", growing up and up.  I tried pruning it a bit when this happened, but it was too little too late.  Furthermore, the flowers always grew at the top, and it hurt me to chop off these tiny dancers

2) The "filler" Helichysum, while a lovely color, was not a filler at all.  It too grew long and leggy.

3) Let's be honest, do you ever see the same plant outside a well-manicured building in the summer to winter?  No.  I should have replanted long ago, but I was hopeful because the fuchsia was is a perennial.

About the only thing that did not disappoint was the "spiller" Muehlenbeckia.  But even that grew a bit aggressively for my tastes, choking out the other plants a bit.

So anyway, it was time to start over.  Learning from my mistakes, I went back to Armstrong to look for a new thriller, filler, spiller.  Specifically, my wish list included a filler that I knew was going to grow into a small dense plant and a softer spiller that maybe would not be so viney.  Having loved the fuchsia's blooms, I wanted to try them again if it was possible that I could find a plant that would somehow grow into a fuller plant.  I didn't have the bug problems I was worrying about with the first one.  So here's the new front door plant family:

Fuchsia = "Thriller"

Notice that this one has more stems, 6 to be total.  According to the people at the gardening center, the pruning has to begin early -- much earlier than the stage you see the plant in now.  The downside of picking this bushier one was that I did not get the multi-colored blooming fuchsia that I preferred (those were already all tall and skinny), but I think these will be quite beautiful as well.

Beautiful Begonia = "Filler"

These popular flowers have somewhat unusual blooms with big waxy leaves that add a nice texture and contrast.  They will also always remind me of my opa who once visited us in Texas.  My dad was convinced no flower could really successfully grow in the Texas heat and our dense clay-like dirt.  And yet, Opa came to visit, planted a bunch of begonias which grew into a luscious garden.  And even came back the next year.  It was amazing.  

Dichondra, aka Silver Falls = "Spiller"

I like the delicate silvery shiny look of these leaves.  And I feel like anything called "Silver Falls" is going to be a good trailing plant.

Here is the final product!  What do you think?

Good luck pot!

Lastly, regardless of how your week is going, today is hump day, and I would like to give you two mid-week pick-me-ups.  First, a few reasons to smile!  And secondly, music from The Lego Movie, which you should definitely watch (warning: if you listen to the clip, you will probably have "Everything is Awesome!" stuck in your head for the rest of the week... is that a bad thing?)  Happy early Valentine's Day!