25 Bags of Love

What's heavy, squishy, and only cost $1.28? A big bag of Moisture Max potting soil from Lowe's!! Apparently last years stock is way too out of fashion to be sold next to the shiny new bags of 2012 soil, so Lowe's is selling them for almost nothing.  An email from my garden goddess friend, Annemarie, sent me racing to Lowe's yesterday to  see if there were any left. 25 bags later I have more soil than I might need. Sounds like an excellent reason to buy more pots! Hooray!!! One more thing - if you are active duty or retired military, you save an extra 10%. Just bring your military ID. :o)

I don't normally buy Moisture Max soil since I try to keep my containers xeric, but this gives me more freedom to grow moisture loving plants without having to worry about the soil drying out too quickly. For my container plants that love to be dry, like penstemon, I'll just mix some soil I already have with a bit of this to keep them happy. The 2012 bags of soil are $7 a piece.

A few of the bags had popped open, but duct tape and a big plastic bag solved the problem. One of our local grocery stores recycles plastic bags, too! Yay!

 A still dormant lespedeza grows in this spot between the driveway, rain barrel, and the Prague viburnums.

I'm redesigning/rethinking my container gardens and have been slowly replacing my ugly, broken pots with nicer fiberglass and ceramic ones. These are from Home Depot. I can hardly wait to fill these with soil and plants!

I bought several greenish ceramic ones in various styles at Home Goods.

An older pot sits inside one of the newer ones to protect the rose from extremely cold winter temps. But we barely had any winter so the rose came through unscathed. I'm going to hide the sloppy slip job on this pot by putting another pot in front of it. The raised design is on both sides so it will still show. It's hard to tell in this picture, but this pot is huge!

This is one of my favorite new pots, purchased at a local garden center. The rim reminds me of pie crust. Most of my pots are clustered together on the patio, waiting to be arranged around the porch, patio, and garden.