Christmas Gardening – Hanging Baskets

Don’t pack away your hanging baskets as winter approaches – they can deliver glorious displays of colour that will last all the way through the misery of winter. Not only that, but they can be cheaper than summer baskets, because plant and material prices often drop steeply in garden centres, which need to get rid of large amounts of stock so they can fill up with Christmas gifts and grottoes!

Planting a winter basket has few differences from summer planting rules but those differences are significant – make sure your baskets are at least fourteen inches across, as anything smaller will be too inclined to freeze or dry out too quickly in the harsher winter winds. Make sure you give your winter plants a new liner and fresh multi-purpose compost. The most important thing to include is to mix water-retaining gel in with your compose, this allows you to water less often and still keep the soil damp, which is important because overwatering in cold weather can lead to you freezing the roots right off your plants.

Fill your basket with colourful winter pansies, cyclamen violets, gem-coloured polyanthus, paler primroses and salvias, and give them some foliage in the form of ivy or tiny conifers for contrast. Once your plants are in, tuck a layer of florist’s moss around and between the plants – this serves three purposes:

It adds to the greenness of the basket which is important at this time of year
It stops the wind-chill hitting the plants at their most sensitive region, where they emerge from the insulating compost
It helps hold moisture in the basket.

Christmas gardening primula photograph by J i J y, used under a creative commons attribution licence