Nurturing your hanging plants.(LIFE - HOME)(GARDENING)

Washington Times, The, March, 2008

Byline: Ruth Hepner, THE WASHINGTON TIMES

My friend Kay is a lifelong do-it-yourselfer. When I met her about 20 years ago, she was repairing toilets and installing garage door openers. Now she's working on fixing her Bethesda container garden.

"I'm kind of getting excited about the spring," Kay told me over lunch the other day. She said she was researching container plantings with an eye toward fixing the problem she had last summer with some hanging baskets of annuals: "If I didn't water them twice a day, they were gone."

The first thing she learned was that some of her containers were too small. The smaller the container, the quicker the soil dries out, so the idea is to buy bigger hanging baskets - great big ones if possible. With more...