Cactus and Planters: Before and After!

Recently I have been taking on several small projects around the garden, in hopes that we can improve the overall curb appeal and infrastructure of the gardens. We have many great plants that we have collected and we're hoping we can expand and sell them to subsidize our garden next season. One plant I've been meaning to fix up for a while is our Peele Island prickly pear cactus. She's worthy of this because it's an endangered species...

 Here is the before and after of the cactus, man it was a pain to clean up! It was painful, but worth it, it can now spread a bit more and I can start taking pads and propogating them. I have plans of planting some hardy succulents around her with maybe some small grasses. You can see I've planted some hen-and-chicks to the right.

Here is my DIY planter fix! I found that new planters were very expensive and even more so if they were earthware or clay. I had a large bucket of dark purple (our blackberry harvest mix) which I have been using on our front door and garage doors, I used some extra paint and cleaned up the old pots. I'm hoping to get another season or two our of the paint job. I found some great plants for my planters;
- Echinacea "Strawberry Shortcake"
- Martin's Spurge "Ascot Rainbow"
- Canna lilly "Tropical White"
- Sweet-Po-Vine "Sweet Georgia Deep purple"
- Regal Geranium "Bravo and Elegance Light"
- Snow on the Mountain
- Electric Blue Lobelia
- White Bacopa
- Dianthus Barbarini Red Rose Bicolour
- Calibrachoa (small petunia) "Callie Star Pink"
- Purple Oxalis


I'm also going to plug President’s Choice® Moisture Lock™ Soil. i picked up one bag of this stuff as Zehrs and it went a long, long ways. I need a bit more for my largest planter, but I am very satisfied. It has a minimal foam content and has little peices of terra-cota, it really does hold the soil moist and fluffy for a long time! Pretty economical aswell. Even through are heat-wave and dry spell, it held up very nicely.