low cost, easy to maintain plants for outdoor pots?

[vannah]

could anyone please recommend something to me? We have found about 8 large pots,Im planning to buy a large bag of compost from wickes (anywhere cheaper?) and plant some long lasting, hard-to-kill plants. Trying to liven up the concrete part of our garden.

(clueless about plants, but we have finally aquired a garden after living in a flat for ages!)
thankyou

Which way does your garden face, and how much sunlight does it get?

If it gets a half decent amount of sun, how about:

Lilies

Delphiniums

Dwarf Lupins.

They're all hardy perennials, i.e. will come back year after year regardless of frosts etc. The delphiniums will need some protection from slugs, but other than that they're relatively hard to kill once established.

They are however, quite big. If you want something that looks like this:

www.growquest.com/container%20gardening/contai35.jpg

Then what you probably want are annuals. You can buy these from any garden centre or B&Q/Wickes for a couple of quid, and they will give you flowers all summer long. Good ones to go for are pansies, osteospermum, lobelia, geraniums etc.

Great thing about annuals, is you only need to keep them alive for 6 months, then they're allowed to die, and you can either replant the containers with spring bulbs (tulips, daffodils etc) or just wait for summer to come along again.

Also if you've got a nice wall for a trellis, try something like a Clematis Montana that will colonise it very quickly.

Small(ish) perennials that do quite well in pots are roses, coreopsis and scabiosa.

I have a dwarf twisted willow that looks nice in a pot & I just seasonally plant things around it to brighten it up (bulbs for winter/primulas in sring/whatever in summer) - you can plant bulbs in a layer under most things & they brighen things up when the garden is a bit sad in the winter.

You can grow most veg in pots. A lot of cut again salads/rocket can be sown all year.

Hebes are pretty hardly/hard to kill. They come in about a million types/colours, just a matter of picking which. I have a nice varigated one with purple flowers.

Good things about pots, you can move them/re-plant them whenever & it changes everything around.

Happy potting!

brilliant! thankyou both. great links naetha, I think i will go for the hardy perennials because I dont see myself attending to them every year. However, I forgot that I do have a wall that could do with some dressing up as its very plain so the trellis/twisted willow is a good idea.

AS is herbs. Theyre a bit pricey at my garden centre though..

We plant geraniums for the very same reason, they're quite hardy so survive most of the year but not always into the next. We lost two in the last winter but two survived. The rest of the time, they are fairly low maintenance, you just need to cut off the dead as it encourages growth.

Sarah