Create great containers for Spring and Summer

One of the easiest ways to promote spring and summer containers is to have them potted and ready for customers to buy.
Spring and summer containers can enhance consumers’ outdoor living space for more than half a year. These seasons may be the only time people use pots to decorate their outdoor living areas. Growers who sell to both landscapers and garden centers need to assist them in planning what type of containers they will need for both residential and commercial customers.

Jump-start spring sales
Spring containers give home gardeners and commercial landscape accounts a jump-start on satisfying their gardening needs. The containers can be assembled before the soil in outdoor beds can be worked and planted. Take advantage of this opportunity and have all the necessary supplies, plants and promotional materials available.
 
Spring containers, just like fall containers, have a short season. They are at their best for six to eight weeks. Emphasize the fact that there is an opportunity to use cool-season plants that thrive during spring and seem to disappear once higher temperatures settle in.
 
You can also extend early-season containers by adding long-lasting plants that will hold together until fall, including dusty miller, ivies, snapdragons, purple cabbage, sage and osteospermums. The addition of perennials, small shrubs and evergreens can help to bridge the spring-to-fall gap and can be planted later into a permanent landscape.

Promoting containers
Here are some easy ways to promote spring and summer containers:

• Have containers potted and ready for sale.
• Set up a potting bench and allow customers to plant their own containers. You can charge them for all of the supplies, or they can pay for the plants and pots and you provide the growing medium or an “expert” to pot up their purchases.
• Schedule a “personal shopper” day and help customers select plants and containers to assemble.
• Designate a display area. Have accessories in place and a variety of plants and ideas for combining them.
• Sponsor a container contest, design clinic, container fair or other participation formats to assist customers while encouraging more purchases.
• Offer container updates encouraging customers to plant seasonal materials as plants past their prime begin to fade, such as spring bulbs and pansies.

Provide examples
Consider other strategies to engage customers to garden in containers. Plant combinations are endless for spring and summer, so be sure to have some simple mass plantings of cool-season annuals.
 
Show how flowering forced bulbs and branches can be used to transition containers from winter to spring. For example, display an urn with a forsythia shrub in full bloom, a crock full of pussy willow branches or sweet peas twining through corkscrew willow stems or a pot of yellow twig dogwood stems with a mass of yellow tulips and primroses.
 
Demonstrate how to place containers for added appeal. Displays can include:

• Display trios, which are three similar or matching containers with a variety of plants. Some of the same plants can be used in each pot to provide a unifying effect. Terrace three pots in a tiered effect. This is a good way to sell several pots together. It works well with herbs, cascading plants such as nasturtiums and shade-loving plants like impatiens.
• Containers used as fillers for holes in a landscape bed.
• How to highlight or give a special plant the right placement when in a container. 

Demonstrate planting techniques, such as the pot-in-pot technique. For this technique, large pots are filled with growing medium, and a smaller pot is placed inside that can be lifted out once the plants are spent. This method is especially good for forced bulbs to show how easy it is to switch out plants from a container once they’re done flowering without having to disturb the plants in the larger container.
 
Place combination containers throughout sales and display areas.
 
Distribute promotional materials about the plants used and suggested combinations. Photos help people to make choices whether a plant is in flower (especially if it is not in bloom at sale) or combinations or companion plants.

A potpourri of plants
Spring is a great time for using hardy bulbs that can be forced, including tulips, daffodils, muscari and hyacinth, along with other spring-flowering plants such as ranunculus, nemesia, linaria, calendula, viola and primula. Vegetables like leaf lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, peas and cabbages add an unusual element.
 
Perennial spring favorites include myosotis, bellis, dicentra, aquilegia, tiarella and pasque flower (Anemone patens). When selecting perennials for containers in spring or summer, the look of the foliage is important because the flowers are short-lived. The color, texture and longevity of interest are in the leaves (more than the flowers in most cases).
 
Don’t forget small shrubs such as barberry, azalea, cotoneaster, forsythia, hydrangea and evergreens. Herbs, decorative branches, groundcovers and native plants can be added to container displays.
 
Inform your customers that spring-flowering crops such as hardy bulbs, perennials and other selections can come back when planted in the landscape.  Customers will appreciate the value and may spend more money knowing the plants will survive and reflower. Offering long-lasting plants allows customers to replace cool-season plants once they are past their prime while still having a few plants remaining.

Sold on summer
The transition from spring to summer can be a smooth and reasonably priced endeavor when you already have available the containers, growing media and plants for the next season.
 
The combinations are endless since consumers can choose from annuals, perennials, foliage and woody ornamental plants — everything but cool-season selections. Summer also allows the use of tropical, prairie natives, non-hardy bulbs, grasses and other warm-weather plants not normally grown outdoors or used in cooler climates.

Container trends
Tropical plants continue to be popular, especially in cooler climates. After a long, cold winter, people enjoy the look of tropical plants. You can create that effect with containers of exotic-looking palms, canna, banana, ti, colocasia, brugmansia, bougainvillea, hibiscus and anthurium.
 
Massed container plantings have grown in popularity as gardeners, designers and landscapers simplify containers to include a single specimen plant or one variety/species in mass. This style appeals to gardeners of all skill levels because anyone can be successful. Massing provides instant impact, especially from far away, and can highlight a great plant that deserves its own container.
 
Another popular trend is using foliage plants in a variety of colors. The secret is out about foliage plants and their benefits, especially when they have a great flower and fantastic foliage.