Video: Shade Conditions: Container Gardening Tips, Ideas & Advice

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Learn how to build a container garden in the shade in this free home gardening video. Get beginner gardening tips, ideas & advice.

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Video Transcript

Hi! My name is Scott Reil and on behalf of Expert Village, I would like to talk to you about container gardening. When planting containers for shade, there are some things to keep in mind specifically with shaded plants. I like to try and do this with all my containers and all my gardens really but when I come in shaded areas, flowers become harder to come by. If you look at the plants in the woods, you don’t see as many flowers as you do on the plants that are out in the sun. Because of that I try to look from foliage colors that are going to be there and really stand out. Things like colias which you can see a variety of different colors and shades that we can work with are great. Here’s a begonia that won’t flower but who needs flowers. Look at the marvelous variegation on there. There are 4 or 5 different shades of reds, greens and silvers in there. That would contrast really well with this New Guinea impatiens Again, this isn’t for full full shade like some other impatiens that we know of. This one wants partial shade but that reddish coloration is just really going to stand out famously. Here’s another begonia and you can see a little bit of a flower power to him but this begonia again with that shiny dark green foliage, that’s going to be a great contrast than ours. Another thing to think about when you are in the shade is ferns. Ferns are a natural shade lover. They look great, they offer a wonderful foliage contrast and it is a plant that is usually taken care of in the shade. It’s not to say that there are no flowers in there. We already talked a little bit about impatiens. Everybody does those but this is torenia. This is a shade plant not a lot of people do know about and it’s a great one. It’s a little taller than the impatiens and roughly at 10 inches, where a lot of the impatiens is sort of in an 8 inch range. It’s got a pretty little flower on it. Again the flower power is not huge on any shade plant but in the torenia’s there’s a lovely range of pinks into blues. Now mom wanted pink this year, so that is what we are doing but next year who knows; maybe some of the blue ones. But in choosing plants for your shady container, remember don’t think so much about what you can do with just the flower power, think about the different foliage contrasts and colors you can work in to make that container look pretty special with just a few plants. There’s not a flower around there but I guarantee you this will be a container that gets oohs and ahs from everybody that come into my yard. Look around, check out the plants that work for you and you like together, put them in good container that will make people stand up and take notice and even a little bit of flower power is going to give you a lot of oohs and ahas.

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Shade Conditions: Container Gardening Tips, Ideas & Advice

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