Man have I been neglecting my blog or what. Sorry about that I wont let it happen again. I was having so much fun on my patio that I forgot to let you see it. Well never fear I documented it all. This year it's been so nice out that I've already got a lot of my plants out. My herbs from last year came back and I've worked with seeds more this year because of the early start.

It's been kind of unseasonably warm here this year. It's not even the middle of May and I've already got blooms on my tomato plants. But I digress, let me show you some of what I did last year.

These are my coleus. I got a variety pack of colors and planted them randomly in an approximately 18" wide pot. I love coleus because of their diverse color scheme and they worked out well with what I had planed on doing with the patio as you will see in my next picture.








This is how they looked after about 6-8 weeks. You would not believe the pictures I got last year. I just love the colors in this picture.
The purple grass in front is one of my favorites. It's tassel are purple then it drys to a soft tan color. The blades of grass are streaked with purple.
Then you have the contrast of green from the banana trees in the back ground and the red geranium. Nature is beautiful.






If you give coleus plenty of food and sun shine they will reward you handsomely. The trick to growing nice bushy coleus is pruning the center. If you will periodically prune the top four leaves of each individual shoot. What I'm saying is that once the plant has developed sufficiently to produce at least four leaves at the tip with some leaf starts just below them, trim the top four with the stalk, and the ones underneath will multiply your foliage.





You know, the fun thing is I probably had no more than$20.00 dollars invested in those pictures. I had the pots and if you short on pots you can find really nice ones at yard sales and some areas, such as Louisville, have what is a day that certain areas fo town can dispose of large waste and items that are not normally picked up as trash. People throw pots out all the time. A few dollars for the coleus. The banana trees are off a plant someone gave me years ago and will reproduce like rabbits if you treat em right so they didn't cost anything either. Really the purple grass was the most expensive thing and the two of them probably cost me ten dollars. So you see you can have a really nice garden no matter where you live.