Many people love hanging baskets — they often pop-up in garden centers around late April and early May and make great gifts for Mother’s Day. However, a hanging basket project can be a maintenance hassle. Whether you choose a large hanging basket of Boston or Kimberly Queen ferns or a basket filled with colorful annuals, hanging baskets require some planning and upkeep to last the entire season. For me, birds always seem to want to make a nest in them (and attract snakes!)

In this post, I’ll share the details of my hanging basket garden project for 2023. Follow along through the phases of the project below. Before getting started, a quick note: I already had hanging basket containers from previous years, so many of the container aspects appear as constraints below in my garden project requirements. I also had leftover extended-release fertilizer from a previous season to use for this project.

The features:

• The project must complete 4 hanging baskets.

The qualities:

• Each hanging basket must contain plants that can tolerate moist soil.
• Each hanging basket must contain at least 3 different types of plants.
• Each hanging basket must contain annuals.

The constraints:

• Each hanging basket must contain plants that tolerate full sun (6+ hours of direct sunlight per day).
• Each hanging basket must contain a green ornamental sweet potato vine.
• Each hanging basket is self-watering (have a water reservoir).
• Each hanging basket is 12.5 inches in diameter.

In summary, I have space for 4 hanging baskets this season. Since the hanging baskets have a self-watering feature/reservoir, the plants must tolerate moist soil and possible wet roots (in other words, no calibrachoa!). I always include an ornamental sweet potato vine to trail out of each basket, but I don’t have a preference for what the other plants may be.

Over the years, I have collected 4 self-watering hanging baskets similar to these self-watering hanging baskets from Gardeners Supply Company. I have 2 white baskets, and 2 deep olive/green (“loden”) baskets. Because it gets awfully hot around here in July/August, I often have to water these hanging baskets once or sometimes twice per day. Therefore, I also use moisture control potting soil to help regulate moisture in conjunction with the self-watering feature of the hanging baskets.

I started with a rough draft design of each hanging basket. The high-level draft helped me remember that I needed to purchase fresh potting soil for this season, so I had to calculate how much potting soil was needed for each hanging basket.

The next step was the most fun — visiting garden centers to see what annuals were available! I visited Home Depot, Lowe’s Home Improvement, and several local garden centers. Eventually, I ended-up at one of my favorite local garden centers (they have a nice selection of Proven Winners annuals each year). After browsing their selection of annuals, I settled on three specific varieties:

Next, I knew I needed fresh potting soil for the project. Both Home Depot and Lowe’s Home Improvement stores had 50-quart bags of Mircle-Gro Moisture Control Potting Soil for around $19.98. However, on an unrelated trip to Sam’s Club, I found the 50-quart bags on sale for $11.98!

At this point, I was able to create an itemized list of resources and materials needed for the hanging basket project. Having existing hanging baskets definitely helped — in previous years, I invested in buying 4 self-watering basket containers (for around $20 each), so spending about $75 for 4 hanging baskets for this year’s project was a deal compared to some of the prices I saw at garden centers for single hanging baskets. Just remember: hanging baskets at garden centers are nearly finished and fully thriving when they are purchased. My hanging baskets, on the other hand, were just getting started and would look pitiful for a few weeks of initial growth.

Next, I double-checked that I had addressed all of the requirements I outlined in the beginning. If I had missed anything, I might’ve needed to change my plant options. Thankfully, nothing changed and all the requirements were satisfied.

For the implementation phase, the hanging basket garden project involved procurement and site preparation activities.

For procurement, I bought the 50-quart bag of potting soil from Sam’s Club (I actually bought 3 or 4 bags because it was a great sale!), and I bought all of the plants from a local garden center in late April 2023. Since I already had hanging baskets from previous years, I just needed to clean the containers for reuse.

To prepare the hanging baskets, I discarded the old potting soil from last season and rinsed the hanging baskets with the water hose to get rid of remaining dirt debris. Next, I sprayed each hanging basket with a diluted bleach mixture to disinfect each to help prevent any soil-borne diseases from returning from last year. After air-drying, the baskets were ready to plant.

I added about 7 quarts of potting soil to each basket. In addition to the soil, I added a small amount of extended-release fertilizer. Next, I placed 1 of each plant in each hanging basket. In other words, each hanging basket contains one sweet potato vine, one Persimmon petunia, and one Bordeaux petunia.

Since this was a smaller garden project, the validation & verification tasks were relatively easy:

For the remainder of the growing season, the hanging basket project requires multiple maintenance activities: