how's it going, everybody? I'm with episode 277 of master, my garden podcast. Now, this week's episode I'm looking at the subject of alternatives to summer bedding and I suppose it's you know it's the time of year where a lot of people have their bedding out and in the pots and so on, and but it really is from now on. You know, the middle of may, the end of june or the early june was kind of the typical kickoff period for bedding plants. And you know bedding plants are beautiful and I've covered it on the podcast before some great combinations that you can use for your hanging baskets, your pots, your window boxes and so on. And you know they are superb. They give huge blasts of color. You'll see it in all the towns. You know the tidy towns committees will be busy putting up their hanging baskets, doing the roundabouts with the, with the flowers and the pots and the street containers and the roundabouts and all that. And you know, as I said, bedding plants are hugely colorful and they add huge vibrancy at this, you know, for the summer months and obviously winter bedding into winter months. So they're hugely, hugely useful. I suppose the alternatives to it that I like to look at are they're going to be. You know pots. You're going to have pots and containers that will give different look. You know, potentially, some you know as nice a flower, but also something that afterwards can be popped into the garden, so something that's going to be comfortable in a pot for a period of time and then, potentially, can be moved out into the garden and so it becomes a more long-term project.

The bedding plants, as I say, hugely beautiful in terms of giving that blast of color and vibrancy, uh, but the thing about them is that it's it's very short-lived and, you know, unless you have to mind them really, really well, it can be extremely short-lived because there's a little bit of minding on bed and plants and pots. There. They need a good bit of watering, they need quite a bit of food, they need a bit of deadheading and so on, and while they do, as I say, look beautiful and they do fulfill that sort of color blast that we look for in the summer, what I'm going to talk about today is kind of a list of alternatives that you know shouldn't be overlooked and will have more longevity, I guess, within your garden, while also providing a level of beauty that will be different to bedding plants but nonetheless will be quite good. And so we're going to look at a lot of different alternatives, and there is lots of different alternatives and some of them will be quite different, quite unique. Quite some people might find them a little bit strange, but there's, you know, there's different ways to look at things and I think you know any of these will be at home on your patio or, you know, at your doorstep and whatever else. So, as I say, some kind of alternatives to your standard container planting of the summer. I've covered, sort of covered this episode before, but this is sort of a different slant on it. You can, of course, you know, incorporate some bedding into most of these type plantings, but these are for the purposes of, you know, this episode. These are complete alternatives to bedding plants, and so I suppose the first one is yeah, definitely, it's definitely not, you know, to compete with bedding.

It's a different idea and it's the growing of, you know, fruit in, you know, a container on your patio or at your, you know, on your balcony or at your back door, and you know, on your balcony or on your at your back door, and you know, sometimes people think that it isn't possible or that it's it's difficult to do or that it doesn't, you know, fit in with color schemes and whatever else. But there's some great opportunities and possibilities here. For example, the Coronet apple that we spoke about on the podcast before it's a, it's an apple that has been bred in ireland to be extremely small, miniature tree and grows no higher than sort of four or five feet and doesn't have a big head on it but does produce fruit, as in apples, on a regular and consistent basis and so that that pot is into, you know, the likes of an oak barrel or a larger pot is a fabulous planting to have on your balcony, on your decking, on your patio area or whatever, and this can be mixed with some flower around the base of it, possibly some tulips earlier in the year. But it's going to give you sort of benefits over more than one window. For example, in the springtime you're going to have nice flower on this apple tree. It's going to be nice and compact and will have some benefit for pollinators there. But then later on your fruit will develop and it's going to be a nice, interesting talking point and then, as the fruit ripens, you know if you're out there gardening with kids at a certain point the fruit is going to be beautiful and ready to harvest, and what a nice, simple and easy way that is to incorporate fruit into your garden. And so the coronet apple is a super example of that.

Another example of that, of course, is strawberry plants so, so easy to grow and again you'll have sort of beauty and interest and food from it. So you have, when you get the, the lush green leaves of the strawberry plant, again that can be planted around the base of your, of your coronet apple, for example, and they're going to produce white flowers. Those white flowers are going to turn into your fruit, and again that's going to be really interesting. And again you know, if you're gardening with children, it's going to be lovely to be able to go out there and pick fruit, and it's a real win-win. Depending on what you know variety you go for. For example, if you wanted to have continuous fruit, you're going to choose an ever-bearing variety that's going to have fruit within its first year and it will continue to fruit over time for years to come. You're going to get at least three to four really really good years out of those strawberries and then at that stage you can save your runners and pot up again, but again more than one period of interest. You'll have the lush, the lush green leaves of the early part of the spring. You'll have the flowers following it on and then, obviously, the beautiful fruit. So a nice addition, interesting addition to to your, your patio or decking. And, again, as I say, you can pair that with the coronet, the coronet apple tree. You can also have the likes of espalier trees trained onto you know, some sort, some form of a trellis that can be planted in a pot up against the wall. So again, you're getting those periods of interest and, of course, you have the benefit of being able to harvest, harvest your fruit from there. So the likes of pears and so on. So so you know, there's lots of opportunities there.

Another good one, and a listener of the podcast showed me, or sent me, a picture of a brilliant example during the week of raspberries. That had been. She had been growing in pots for a while and had struggled a little bit, but after, you know, giving her some advice on what to do, she's now grown successfully, really successfully, with fruit every year, raspberries in a pot, and the pot was a lovely decorative pot and that looks extremely well on your again, on your, your patio or your entertaining area and again you have these fresh strawberries ready to pick, fresh raspberries ready to pick whenever they're ripe. So you're adding sort of interest and different functions to to these plants, as opposed to it being just the aesthetic or the beauty of, you know, what we know as bedding plants. So fruit is a good option.

Another really good option is is rock planters or alpine style plants, and I spoke about these before on the podcast. These are, again, really, really good. You can do them into hanging baskets, window boxes, small pots containers and anything. They're going to be happy in there for a long, long period of time and with the correct mix of small plants. So alpine plants are, generally speaking, they grow in rocky or clay-siled or typically the ones that you would see creeping into the gaps in stone walls and that type of thing. Or you'd see them on coastal areas. You'll see likes of trift in coastal areas and you get the cultivated versions of those that are suitable for your, your alpine or rock plantings.

But the beauty of these is that you're planting them now. They're going to be, they're going to be low maintenance, which is big thing with pots, a lot of pots can be, you know, can require quite a bit of maintenance, as I mentioned with bedding plants, but the likes of alpine plants, they're going to be quite low maintenance. So once you're starting with the kind of correct growing media at the start and for any of these planters, actually a really good sort of rule of thumb for for your potting mixes go with one third topsoil, one third good quality compost, that's composted plant materials, and one third farmyard manure and mixing in a bit of seaweed into that dried seaweed and that's a superb mix for basically any of these planters that I'm going to talk about. But the rock planters will be that same mix but you're going to mix through a little bit of horticultural grit or horticultural sand through that. So you're basically creating a more airy, free draining growing media.

But those plants are going to require very little maintenance. They don't, you know they're not. They don't require high amounts of feed and they don't require higher, high amounts of water. But they will have flower, they will have interest. You know, in terms of the likes of the oparichas is going to have spring interest. Then you're going to have saxifrage which is going to be flowering now and you're going to have sempervernums which are going to be able to spread and sprout and you're going to see new plants developing and spreading and they're adding different layers of interest. So you'll have color at different times, you'll have flower at different times, you'll have the multiplication of the plant and the plant creating basically new little plants off the side of it, and they're all interesting. Aubreches is another one, and Oxalis is a really nice one, very, very continuous flowering for a longish period of time and really beautiful, and Luisia is another one.

So, yeah, there's lots of various rock plants. So when you go into your gardens and you're looking for the alpines or the rock plants, they'll come in really, really small pots and this can be planted into a really small container it doesn't have to be a big one at all and it's just going to give you a really low maintenance planter that can look well, can sit on your on your patio, your decking, your balcony, and and thrive over many, many years with quite, quite little input from yourself. So it's always a good one to add in and then going to look at some sort of singular plants that can just steal the show on their own, and I suppose we're better placed to start them with roses. So again, roses and pots do extremely well. In fact, sometimes they can do a lot better than they will do out in the open ground, depending on the type of ground that you do have.

But you'll remember back to episode 244, I had Joseph from David Aston Roses on and we spoke a lot about various types of roses, the benefits of David Aston Roses and so on and so forth. But we spoke a lot about potted roses in that episode and it was a really, really good one, if you ever want to go back and check it out. So episode 244. But there's some fantastic roses for containers.

And again, when you talk about longevity, so if you get, say, some of the patio roses, they will continually flower for months and months on end. A lot of roses are just starting now, so you'll see a lot of people this week with the first rose flower popping out, but over the months of June, july, august, september, even up into October, some of these roses will have flowers for that length of time and they'll require, again, very, very little input from yourself once they're established. So you're looking for a little bit of watering and a little bit of feeding, especially, especially on the patio ones that are continuously um pushing out flower, just they're. They're quite hungry and type of plant. But again, if you're starting with that mix of one third, one third, one third with the seaweed in it, that would be superb to to give them a couple of years and then you will need to be feeding them after that to, I suppose, allow them to be, to remain strong and to push out those flowers.

Some good examples there, particularly from the david astin range, are things like um gertrude jekyll, which is a really beautiful sort of deep pink color, fantastic smell on it. That's quite tall now, so that's going to be a shrub rose, an old English shrub rose, but fragrant, strong plant, so quite big, will have loads of flower, abundance of flower on it, and that's a brilliant, brilliant example. Gabriel Oak is another one. So there's's you know there's lots of really good examples of roses that will be perfect in containers or planters and it's going to give you, when you have a rose, a really good rose that's grown really well, that's flowering, then the high impact from that is going to be equally as good as the best possible you know display that you'll have from your bedding plants. So really good alternative. And again, if you get some of these shrub roses that will be quite tall and upright. You'll have a lot of flower up high. There is always the potential to add some more color just around the base, especially if you're into something like an oak tub, which can be quite big. You'll have the space to get some flower in around the outside. So double the impact by by doing this. But again, as you, as you know, as you'll see everything I've mentioned so far if at some point in time it gets, you know it basically has outgrown the pot, it's quite comfortable at that point going out into your garden beds. So, again, you're getting longevity out of it, real long time out of it, and that's, I think, what we're kind of aiming for with these type recommendations.

Then we're going to kind of move on to sort of foliage plants, and there's so many here. These are plants that are capable of holding a centerpiece or holding a pot and looking extremely well pretty much for 12 months of the year. Obviously there might be times where they'll look a little bit better or grow be growing a little bit better, but there is, there is these plants that will look well all year round in a, you know, in a pot or a planter, and some of them actually that I'm going to mention have been developed by an Irish breeder called Pat Fitzgerald, and Pat has some varieties of plants that you know that are really designed to be in pots or planters, really designed to be in pots or planters, and he has, he has a, he has a website on them. You can't buy from them, but it's just kind of for research, for research purposes it's. I think it's my plant dot, ie, I think and basically he just highlights some plants that are suitable for your garden border but also really, really comfortable in your containers and pots and so on, and yeah, there's some superb ones in there.

First one I'm going to mention is an interesting one. It's hostas and you know hostas. There's so many, so many varieties of of hosta. As we heard before on the podcast, the young leaves are actually edible on most hostas. I've never actually tried them myself, but yeah, they are.

But if you can get a hosta over a period of time to fill out a pot so you might have a 30 centimeter pot get a good size hosta, plant it into it and allow it over three or four years to continue to to grow and fill out that pot, obviously for the winter time. There's no leaves there that that planter can go away. You know, behind the scenes, where it's not going to be seen, but when the springtime comes and that's opening out and and as they are now out into full, the full foliage has opened up. There is so many beautiful hostas, you know, in a if you get a dark terracotta pot and put a really nice hosta into it that has filled out the pot, you'll struggle to find a better display in a pot than something like a hosta. It's, it's very basic. There is no flower of note. I know they do flower but no flower of note on it. But that foliage and the way it sort of frames the pot or sort of creates a canopy over the pot is just fantastic. And, as I say you'll do, you know it will look fantastic on any border or in any decking, you know, on any seating area, balcony, any of those things. The beauty of it as well is that it's really, really happy in shade, but it also does well in full sun. So they are a shade plant, typically speaking, but hostas will do well more or less anywhere. So if you're on a shaded balcony, for example, it'll do fine, but if you're on a balcony that's getting loads of sun, it'll also do fine same for, you know, your, your patio areas, or whatever. It's a fantastic plant and they do when filled out. So don't go for a pot that's really big. On this you're going to go for, sort of a 30 centimeter pot or something like that nice decorative pot. Get a good, a good size hosta that you, you know you really like the foliage of, and allow it to fill out over a couple years and you will find a container that just looks superb for several months of the year. As I say, it'll die off in the winter time. You just put that away where it can't be seen and then up it goes. It comes again next year and again it's a really high impact but low effort container on your behalf, which is, I think, what we're all looking for.

Another one that's, you know, loved and hated by a lot of gardeners. Some gardeners consider them to be weeds. I am not one of those. I think they look fantastic for at certain times of the year and that's agapanthus. So there's so many agapanthus there and again it will need a little bit of time to just fill out a pot, but if you and again, it's only for sort of six months of the of the summer, but if you can get a again a pot that's not too big, get a really nice colored agapanthus into that, allow it to fill out over a period of a couple of years and that will be a display that can be just popped in and out over the next years to come.

Dies back in the winter time. Nothing to look at in the winter time, obviously, but then summertime, a little bit like the hosta, it comes out beautiful flowers on it, typically your reds like or sorry blues, dark blues, light blues and even some whites. But my favorite is the really really dark, deep blue flower that you can get. The foliage itself, you know is can be quite uh, shiny, just looks fresh and if they're grown really, really well, it's a nice, a really nice plant for for pots. So that's agapanthus, and again, there's loads of different varieties there. The next one is can look with. It will look exactly the same all year round and this is why it's. It's a really brilliant one for pots.

And that's astelius, and again mentioned pat forster. So some of these varieties are have been bred by him and you know a couple of them are astelia silver shadow, and that's a really silvery leaf um plant. It's looks a little bit like your cord line leaf, a little bit like that. So it's that style of a leaf and they kind of fall over. But again, a bit like what I was saying with the hosta, when, when they start to grow and fill out that pot, they really frame the pot and you can have that lovely contrast of this gray foliage up on top and this nice pot on the bottom, nice decorative pot on the bottom, and the silver foliage is fantastic. That planter, that plant, then, you know, in a couple years time, if it outgrows that pot, you can, you have the option to pot it on into a bigger pot. Alternatively, if you're on a, you know, small patio area or whatever, it can comfortably go out into the garden and will grow away happily there for years and years. So again, there's longevity in everything that we're doing here.

Another really good astelia is son of a red devil and that's, as the name suggests, a red leafed one. It's a beautiful one as well and that's, you know, along the same lines of silver shadow. It's going to be a long-term plant. A beautiful, beautiful color on it and and really good then other ones, the cord line, which you know was. It's a sort of a sort of a plant from the past. Every garden from a house that was built 30 or 40 years ago has a big, tall card line somewhere at the front and probably standing 10 foot tall at this stage.

But there is so much more to card lines than that, the the beautiful ones that are there now, again suitable for for planters and again suitable to go into gardens afterwards. There's one particular one that's fantastic colors. Sorry, fantastically interesting colors. Personally, I don't love the colors of them. I think they're. They're. Yeah, I just don't love the colors of them. They're. It's charlie boy. Charlie boy is a fantastic plant. Personally, the colors don't do it for me, but there's a beautiful kind of pinky, gray, gray, greeny color to it. There's kind of three tones to it and it's a lovely, lovely mix of colors. There's some other good ones, like Tar Bay Dazzler. It's another really good one. Again, you'll see those on my plant that I eat and there that's a brilliant, a brilliant plant to go, as I say, forget about the one that's, you know, 10 feet tall at the front of your, your granny's house or whatever, and card lines are so much more than that. These days they are a little bit overlooked. They are a little bit, you know, people kind of don't like them as much as they used to. They're a little bit out of out of fashion, I think I would say. But certainly there's some fantastic ones there and again it's a plant that can go to the garden or go into a bigger planter after.

Another good one is Carex. So Carex, evergold, carex, everillo, different like the evergold, is a really bright, fluorescent, greeny, yellow type color. The everillo has a silvery, you know a silvery kind of a or again a greeny kind of a shade to it, um, luminous kind of color, for want of a better word. And they're superb, they're really. They have really abundant foliage, so lots of foliage that again will hang down over a pot and it looks like it's hanging over the edge of the pot like a shaggy dog hanging over the hair of the shaggy dog hanging over the head. It's kind of a really interesting contrast between the pot if you get a nice pot to go into it. So carex, a really really good one as well, and some other ones that kind of get overlooked a lot nadinia, and again, some nice ones there.

Yuccas don't like them personally, but they're brilliant. They are brilliant for for plant, for planters and containers. And then some of the other grasses, the likes of miscantus that can give you just on a patio, can give you just such a tall, flowy type foliage that's really really good for screening areas and that sort of thing. And bamboo will also do the same thing. So bamboos do really well in containers and like. The thing about bamboos is that they'll they'll be quite hungry, they'll be quite thirsty in there, so you will need a bit of maintenance on them, but but they are superb in planters and containers and ideal for screening, you know. So if it is in a patio area that you'd like a bit of privacy on, you can create for want of a better word a hedge of bamboo. That is not completely blocking the view, but it certainly gives you a layer of privacy that adds to it.

Another good one is chysia. So chysia, again, probably a plant that's a little bit out of fashion at the moment and certainly one that gets overlooked a little bit, but chysia thornatus sundance is a super one. Choisea ternatus sundance is a super one and that's um, you know that's, that's a. A plant that is perfect in a container will look well, will look exactly the same for 12 months of the year. You know it's, it's one that is going to look the same all the time and then eventually can go out into the garden or can go onto a bigger pot. So, again, we're getting this longevity out of it and that's. You know, that's what you're kind of aiming for on these things.

Another option is a herb planter. So these are, these are going to be superb and obviously you have the functionality of having fresh herbs for your cooking, fresh herbs for your herbal teas possibly, and medicinal herbs and so on. But there is also so much more to herbs in terms of the look. So, for example, you can get a beautiful bronze sage, so it gives you that same taste that you get from a standard sage, but it has a bronze leaf on it and looks really well. So it's ornamental. And if you're able to mix a planter together, possibly with a bay laurel in the center so, for example, if this was an oak barrel bay laurel in the center, you know around it then you have your, your bronze sage, variegated thyme, there's a variegated lemon balm, beautiful for teas but also really, really attractive in look. There's the likes of fennel, and again you can get bronze fennel. So, again, beautiful, look, your parsley, your chives and all of those. You can mix all those together and create a really, really beautiful display of herbs that will sit comfortably on your patio and all the time they are to be harvested, to be used in your cooking, to be used in your herbal teas and so on. So, again, more functionality, more longevity in the planters.

That's not to say that bedding plants don't have their place. That's not to say that I don't like bedding plants. I love them, but I just think we should. I don't like bedding plants, I love them, but I just think we should view things in in a slightly longer term maybe as well, and look at not alternatives but complementary plantings that we can do. That maybe means that all your containers if you have 10 pots, then you have two or three of them that are bedding plants and the rest are more long-term, which for you means that you have less, less work you're going to, you know, do the planting once and then you'll have a little bit of maintenance on them, I guess you know, in terms of watering and feeding, but typically they're going to be a lot easier to mind and bed and they're certainly going to give you a lot more longevity. So complementary, complementary ideas rather than replacing the replacement of bedding plants.

So that's kind of what I wanted to cover in this week's episode. There's obviously bloom was coming up and I've just this week got the irish garden on the on the back page actually, or the second page from the back page 88 I'm in there this week and my inspiration piece. So a little little bit about about me and what has inspired me in gardening. So check out the Irish garden. It's, it's a great read at the best of times and, as I say, I have a little piece on the back page of this, of this episode which is brilliant. But also in this episode is an extensive Bloom preview.

I guess Bloom's coming up in a couple of weeks time, in a week's time, the 29th, starting Thursday the 29th and runs right through the Bank Holiday weekend until the 2nd of May, and there's some on the garden stage. There's some fantastic speakers Won't go through this full schedule but just to give you an idea of some of the speakers that are, on thursday it's emceed by fiona nulon, who's the holistic gardener, former guest of the podcast, really super guest of the podcast. But on the stage on thursday you have dear mcgavin, you have adam frost of bbc gardeners world fame he's on the main stage. Leonie carnelius, a former guest. Jimmy blake of hunting brook gardens, talking about propagation. Mary keenan from the irish garden and gash gardens that's fantastic garden for anyone that, um, that hasn't been. And mary's wealth of plant knowledge. So mary's on the stage on several days, which is definitely there on the thursday, and then there's a panel discussion at the end.

Friday you have any different speakers mary reynolds is on, adam frost, again there. Mcgavin, mick kelly, founder of giy, is on. So paul smith is actually on friday as well. Another fantastic gardener, saturday. We've Colin O'Driscoll and Kitty Scully kicking off the day Saturday morning. So again two brilliant, brilliant gardeners Doreena Allen, mary Reynolds again. Niall McAuley is on in the afternoon. Niall, again a former guest of the podcast. So loads on. And that continues through sunday and monday as well. And niall hatch, talking about attracting birds into your garden, is on monday.

And you know many, many more uh, brilliant speakers on the garden stage over a couple of days of bloom. So yeah, definitely it's a, it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant day out for a family. Actually, there's loads to do Loads of, you know, from a food perspective. There's loads of food halls and variety of foods and different things to look at. So it's fantastic. Lots of good speakers this year as well.

And then that's just one stage. That's the garden stage. There's the. There's the Irish garden plant health clinic, so you can bring your, your pictures of your plants or your leaves, your plants, and if you have some issue or other, and show them and they'll give you solutions for that or tell you what it is and tell you how to sort of remedy it. So there's lots of, lots of good things on. There's a sustainability stage, I think as well, so there's some you know good speakers on there. There's the flower rangers have a brilliant marquee there, so there's lots of different flower arranging events and talks goes on there. Yes, there's loads going on at bloom and the fact that it's over five days on a bank holiday gives people a great chance to go and, as I say, it's a good family event.

Following week after that, then, is buds and blossoms leash garden festival. I'm speaking at that myself and so hope to talk a little bit more about that on the podcast next week, and you know there is just some really good speakers and some great stories there. Some great, great stories there to be told. Looking forward to speaking at again. I found it was my first kind of event to talk at in in that way and but I really enjoyed it last year and, yeah, nice to get back again this year. So, loads coming up.

That's um, that's pretty much this week's episode. As I say, alternatives are combinations to the sort of standard bed and plant containers that you might see there. Some ideas to you know, maybe get some longevity, more longevity, to have less work on yourself, to pot these planters once and not have to do it again for maybe a number of years, but while also getting the benefit, or the longer term benefit than maybe you would from something like a summer bedding container. As I say, both have their place, both can complement each other, but there are some alternative ideas, alternative ideas to you know, to to fill your pots and your containers this summer. And that's been this week's episode. Thanks for listening and until the next time, happy gardening.