Porch season is here! Yippee! It’s THAT time of year!!! The weather is finally warm here, danger of frost is past…at least we HOPE it is…and it’s time to set up our outdoor living spaces for the season.  

I have 2 outdoor seating areas - the back porch, and my home office entrance patio that we did for the ORC challenge a while back. That area needs some love again and SOMETHING just stripped all the leaves and some of the flowers off a few of the perennial plants….grrrrrr.

I’ll get to setting up the pocket patio in the next few days, but right now I’m focusing on our back porch, which is where we LIVE in the warm weather, and into cooler fall weather too with the help of Percy. You can meet Percy here.

Step 1: Acquire Plants

Nothing says summer like a riot of plants and flowers blooming, and nothing makes me happier than being surrounded by the beauty in nature! This week I started accumulating the annuals to fill the planters for the season.  A trip to my favorite wholesale greenhouses yielded a car FULL of wonderful things. We pretty much maxed out the cargo space.

I’m a big container gardener kind of girl.  I prefer to dig in the clean, bug-free and worm-free dirt I can buy rather than the dirt in the ground full of unpredictable and unpleasant things if I can help it!

Last year I added new porch furniture from Polywood in black with white cushions and some black and white striped patio umbrellas with scalloped edges (of course!).

This allows me to easily embrace the trend toward color in all things home with a riot of flower colors.

I love the varieties available…white latte petunias with chocolate centers, evening star in deep purple with yellow stripes, and queen of hearts with 5 red heart shapes separated by yellow stripes!

This year we are focusing on yellow, pink, and purple for the palette of flowers. This is the first installment from the nursery awaiting planting.

We’ll also purchase some herbs for the kitchen cutting garden-in-a-pot.  Basil and rosemary are essentials…I’m actually managing to keep pots of those alive year round in my new kitchen bay window color me proud!

We’ll add sage and thyme and parsley and chives and mint to the mix.  And, I will reluctantly add cilantro for the rest of my family…though that may get quarantined in its own pot.    

This year I’m abandoning tomatoes. My track record with tomatoes has been dismal and generally the chipmunks eat more of them than we do.

I may try strawberries and some of the herbs in the vertical garden planter I bought last year…the friskiest creatures seem to stay out of that for the most part.

My giant planter got a hydrangea and azalea last year along with the annuals, and those have both made a comeback so yay of that!

A trick to using giant planters is to fill the bottom with something light that takes up space so you won’t have to fill it with dirt all the way to the bottom.  I’ve used packing peanuts before for this.

Now I sometimes use the empty nursery pots from stuff we’ve planted - they seem to multiply when I’m not looking and they are very light.  Placed upside down and stacked and layered they take up a bunch of space in the bottom of the pot.

This is the mega planter from a couple years ago.

My big schefflera that winters in the dining room will get to hang out on the back porch for the summer, a perfect backdrop for the corner of the seating group.

And some of the other houseplants I’ve miraculously kept alive will go out too. They are much happier when God waters them…I am less consistent, at least when they are indoors and I can’t use a hose!

Step 2: Plant the planters

This part is underway and going well except that I need to get some more potting soil.  We always try to plant the pots with thrillers, fillers and spillers like we’ve shown for floral arrangements. 

We refresh the soil by mixing in some new potting soil and some slo-release fertilizer. This post on container gardening has more info on that.

Some of our containers have evergreen shrubs in the middle for a tall element and for those we just underplant with flowers and some drippy greenery like ivy and vinca.

All our pots get some of the drippy greenery to spill over the edges.  This year some of the ivy survived the winter, and we’ll add a second variegated variety where needed.

Then we’ll add flowers or herbs or both to the rest of the pot.

We have a few hanging baskets of mixed annuals, and two mandevilla plants that will climb an iron obelisk trellis and a teepee of stakes (and anything else it can get at!)

I LOVE the smell of gardenia and had this one a couple of years ago, but most of the blossoms inexplicably kept falling off before they bloomed, so I’ll have to call that a fail and opt for something else this year.

Step 3: Arrange the furniture and other stuff.

Our porch furniture actually stayed out all winter with no ill effects.  I can’t believe I used to haul it all indoors every fall - which was apparently unnecessary.  I only bring in the cushions and umbrellas now.

We also need to scrub the outdoor rugs and set up the water feature.

In the meantime, I’m reveling in this warmer weather and soaking up the atmosphere we’ve created so far!

Happy Almost Summer!!

Other posts you might enjoy:   

Top Tips for Planning an Outdoor Room

Simple Joys: Container Gardening

Thrillers Spillers and Fillers, the basics of floral or container arrangements

Kitchen Cutting Garden: Our Herb Garden in a Container

A peek at our new Polywood porch furniture