How to Make Hanging Flower Baskets

You know it's spring when you drive down the street and everyone is hanging out their flower baskets. They make a beautiful addition to your porch or yard, but they can be very expensive to buy made up already. Well, nothing will get you out of the winter dull-drums than making your own hanging baskets. It's only a fraction of the cost, it's easy and you get the rewarding feeling of making them yourself.

Things You'll Need

• Wire or plastic hanging basket
• Coconut fiber or sphagnum moss for lining the wire Basket
• Flower plants
• Potting soil
• Gardening gloves

Instructions

1. Pick out your flower plants and baskets. You can use a metal basket with a coconut fiber or sphagnum moss liner or a plastic hanging basket. The metal baskets give you more options as to how to plant the plants but dry out much quicker than plastic. The plastic containers not only hold the water better but usually have a well, so the plant can soak it up as needed. You will find a hundred varieties of plants in every color at your local nursery or home improvement store, in their garden section. Combinations of plants are a personal preference, but the best presentation would be a trailing plant or two, a taller flower, and some smaller leafier flowers. Use colors that complement each other. You want to make sure your combination has the same watering and sunlight requirements.

2. Plant your flowers. Use a potting soil that is made for hanging baskets and is pre-mixed with some fertilizer. Place a small amount of soil in your basket. If you are using a wire basket you can cut holes in the sides of the liner and pull the root end of your plant gently through, and fill the rest of the basket with soil. Putting some plants in through the sides creates a much fuller look to your basket. Place your trailing plants to the outside of your basket and you tall ones in the center. Fill in with your smaller flowers. Don't overcrowd your plants as they will grow and fill out, so give them some room.

3. Water your flowers well but not with a lot of force or you will push them right out of the fresh soil. Start to fertilize your plants in about a month. Hanging plants need to be watered at least once a day and with the wire baskets, possibly twice. Watch them when it is really hot outside.

4. Create a green basket. All of your hanging baskets don't have to contain flowers. Green trailing plants are beautiful in hanging baskets. Try some English Ivy and Creeping Jenny, or a basket of a variety of sweet potato vines. Now you have a few hanging baskets, probably for the cost of one at the store and much more beautiful.

Tips & Warnings

• If you can't decide on plant combinations, ask the clerk at the nursery or garden department what they have seen put together that looks good.