Back Issue
March/April 2000

Spring Pots and Windowboxes
by Anita Ballek

This is the first of a three-part series on container plantings: How to have lovely pots and windowboxes for ten months of the year. This first article, “Spring Pots & Windowboxes,” explains how to plant for continuous bloom from March through June.

In June your summer pots and windowboxes (which you planted around May 1) are ready for display and will remain showy until killed by frost. Then your winter containers (which you planted in mid August) will dazzle until January.

It’s important to start with several sets of pots and/or windowboxes in order to have continuous bloom because you’ll need to plant the next display before the first display has finished.

Complete instructions for these three-season pots and windowboxes will be in future issues of The Connecticut Gardener.

There are many plants that will flower in window boxes as early as March. My boxes face north and west. To fill them, I choose plants that are suitable for all locations but that last longer in the cool of the bright north.

Every year I plant my spring window boxes around the first of March. I tuck small bedding plants into a bagged (weed-free) peat/compost soil, adding 2 cups of slow-release fertilizer (Osmacote, for example) for each 9 inch by 3.5 foot windowbox (adjust the amount of fertilizer accordingly for your containers). I supplement the time release with a constant dilute feeding of 20-20-20 (1 scant teaspoon per gallon).

I grow them on in a cool sheltered sunny location. An unheated entryway or sunporch facing southeast, south or southwest is perfect. Night temperatures should be around 35 degrees.

My goal is to set the windowboxes out in my garden by March 25. At this time the pansies, violas, primroses and English daisies are in full bloom and the rest are just beginning. The lovely rosettes of lettuce fill out later but are already the focal points of the show.

By the end of April the alyssum and lobelia are twinkling through the skirt of linaria and the stock is poking up wafting their fragrance. By mid May the linaria is getting stronger, and by the end of May I am removing the outside leaves of the lettuce every day for lunch (I am a lettuce fanatic) to make room for the crowding bevy of blossoms. The linaria generally takes over the show and gets more and more voluptuous.

The plants all kind of push and shove each other and give a different effect every year. They weave themselves together and always look pretty!

How long the show will last (until the end of June last year) depends on the weather. A week of extremely hot weather spells the end of these cool-season plants but by this time my summer boxes, planted in early May, are voluptuous and ready to go.

Anita Ballek is the owner of Ballek’s Garden Center in East Haddam.

Anita Ballek's Favorite Choices for Spring Pots and Windowboxes
Alyssum
English Daisies (Bellis perennis)
Lettuce
Linaria
Lobelia
Pansies or Violas
Parsley
Primroses
Stock - I vary the varieties from one year to the next. Either I plant 'Dwarf Midget' that grows to about 12 inches or Virginia stock (Matthiola virginiana). Virginia stock has fine little blossoms and weeps over much like linaria but blooms a month earlier. At the shore, in a cool northwest or northeast location, it can bloom into October.

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