Back in the old terra-cotta days, fall meant it was time to empty the flower pots and pack them away in the garage until next May.
They’d crack over winter if you didn’t.
These days, gardeners have widely switched to pots made out of lightweight foam resin or heavy molded plastic — materials that can withstand the freezing temperatures of a Pennsylvania winter.
Concrete, wooden, and metal containers also can endure our winters.
So if you’re using any of those in lieu of terra-cotta or ceramic, these winter-resistant containers are fair game for four-season use.
Some gardeners change out their pots three or four times a year instead of using them only for summer annual flowers.
This time of year, frost-killed annual flowers can be replaced with cold-tolerant color plants such as mums, pansies, violas, ornamental kale and cabbage, and even perennials and herbs with colorful foliage, including coralbells, ajuga, golden creeping sedum, ferns, yucca, and purple or tricolor sage. Garden centers usually display these front and center in fall.
Heading into winter, those choices can be replaced with cuttings from around the yard — fare such as evergreen cuttings, red-twig stems, bundles of cut ornamental grasses, dried hydrangea flowers, and clusters of holly berries, juniper berries, and beautyberries.
These can be stuck right into the potting soil, no need for watering or other care over winter.
Species such as dwarf Alberta spruce and upright boxwoods, junipers, and arborvitae are three choices increasingly showing up in garden centers for use as live Christmas trees in pots. If you keep them watered over winter, they can be planted in the ground in spring.
As winter hands off to early spring, the pots can be replaced again with tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, and other spring-blooming bulbs – either ones you’ve planted and overwintered as dormant bulbs in the pots in fall or ones bought already in bloom from the garden center in spring.
Early-blooming perennials (i.e. Lenten rose, creeping phlox, dianthus, foamflowers, and lungwort) also can be used, as can a few scavenged cuttings from early-blooming shrubs, such as forsythia, witch hazel, winter hazel, and spicebush.
That’ll bridge the gap until May when your four-season pots return to conventional duty with a new crop of summer annuals.
Any perennials used in pots can be returned to the ground for spring planting. Divisions of them can be dug in fall for pot use, saving the expense of buying new perennials.
Besides maximizing decorative mileage of your pots, especially the out-front ones, using them in fall, winter, and early spring saves the annual fall chore of dumping soil and lugging pots into storage.
If a pot is going to stay in place and merely change wardrobe with the seasons, that makes bigger pots more doable. Big pots give more impact and are more forgiving about watering in summer.
A four-season pot also fits nicely into the bigger trend of four-season gardening, our increasing interest in having landscapes that look good year round and change with the seasons.
Besides plants, out-front pots can be decorated with other seasonal touches.
Pumpkins, pine cones, corn stalks, and straw bales, for example, make good pot neighbors in fall.
Winter pots can be strung with lights and adorned with ribbons and bows for Christmas.
In February, pots can get a simple red heart on a stick to add a Valentine’s Day flair.
If you’re growing live plants in sub-freezing weather, go with species that have USDA Cold Hardiness ratings that are a zone lower than our usual Zone 6 or Zone 7. To be on the safe side in your more cold-exposed, faster-drying pots, go with plants rated for Zone 5 or lower. (These numbers are on all plant labels.)
The thicker the pot walls, the more cold and wind protection they offer. Stone, concrete, and thick-walled resin pots are examples.
Live shrubs and evergreens growing in off-season pots should be watered once a week throughout winter if it doesn’t rain or snow – especially broadleaf evergreens that lose significant moisture through their leaves all winter.
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