Winter is coming, the clocks have gone back, and we’ve made planters with cyclamen, pansies and layers of spring bulbs. They’re a cheerful addition to the garden that I hope will give many months of colourful flowers through winter and spring. Here’s how ‘we’ made them, what it cost, and a few lessons learned.

Each planter contains bright pink cyclamen and vibrant orange winter pansies, above a selection of bulbs. We put them very close to the house, so each morning when I open the living room curtains they greet me with colour. The planters went out in late October and I hope they’ll be in bloom until May next year – that’s up to seven months’ worth of morning smiles 🙂

Here’s a few pointers from lessons we learned along the way…

We bought the black metal planters at a market about 18 months ago for a bargain price of about £20 – and they sat empty while we procrastinated. I was mildly miffed occasionally by the lack of progress but never quite enough to do much about it.

In summer, we purchased a roll of coir lining to make a start on the planters.

We realised several weeks later that we did not have enough material.

Lessons learned

1. Basket / trough style planters require a surprisingly large amount of lining. The seemingly very large roll of material we was insufficient for these deep planters. Wishful thinking will not increase the surface area the material can cover. In hindsight, it would have made sense to bring measurements with us to the garden centre.

2. Trimming the coir can be surprisingly tricky – especially if you’re left-handed and only have right-handed scissors available. Swearing might help, but asking your right-handed wife is also an option. 🙂

Next we lined lined the basket with coir, adding a sheet of plastic with drainage holes, made using the same technique children use to make paper snowflakes – folding the sheet and cutting triangles. The plastic liner is meant to ‘protect’ the coir, which I could otherwise degrade fairly quickly in contact with wet compost, but the planters need good drainage so the roots don’t rot… So it’s a bit of a balancing act.

The lined planters were filled about a third full with a mixture of peat free compost and a bit of horticultural grit, and then the bulbs go in, layer by layer.

Layering the bulbs

The bulb ‘lasagne’ is so-called because of the way the ‘layers’ of bulbs are planted.

If I’d planted these they would have been scattered willy nilly, with the bigger bulbs sort of at the bottom, the middle ones chucked in on top, and the smaller ones lobbed on above those.

But my lovely husband is meticulous, and here is how he set out the bulbs. 🙂

The first layer of the lasagne is made of of the biggest bulbs, which should be planted deeper than the smaller ones. This is a mix of pink and white hyacinths and I’m looking forward to their sweet scented flowers, hopefully in March or April next year.

On top of the hyacinth, there’s a layer of soil, followed by the mid sized bulbs. This one has tulips at the front, and alliums at the back. The allium bulbs look like bulbs of garlic, adding to the ‘lasagne’ vibes of this layered planting project.

Then another layer of soil, bechamel sauce and grated cheese, and then anemones and ixia arranged in a neat, zig-zag grid. (I lied about the bechamel sauce and cheese). 🙂

The final layer of bulbs was topped with winter bedding plants – cyclamen and pansies.

I chose bright pink and bright orange because I loved how they clash and zing together. Apparently  “Pink and orange sit side by side on the colour wheel, which means they naturally complement each other”, and this colour combo is now trending for interiors, says Ideal Home.

Winter is not a time, in my view, for subtlety in planting. When it’s dark and grey I particularly appreciate a pop of pink and orange. 🙂

Was it worth it?

We spent about £40 on bulbs for the two planters, which feels like a bargain to me. Adding in the cost of the planters, peat free compost and horticultural grit, and the cyclamen and pansies, overall the cost was about £70 to make these two large planters.

Assuming they make me smile twice daily (on average) to the end of May, that’s seven months of morning cheer at about 16p per smile. 🙂

Worth every penny I think.

The lesson learned is Do The Plan!

We had this little project planned to plant flowers to cheer up the winter mornings from when we moved here, about six years ago. There’s a small deck by the living room doors that we wanted to put plants on, but we needed planters on ‘feet’ to minimise damage to the wooden deck. And we needed to replace the deck itself, which we realised was rotten after we’d moved in.

It took a few years of prioritising other things, and mooching at markets, before we spotted some second-hand planters that felt just right for that spot.

And then another 18 months or so before we finally got around to getting all the bits together, and getting on with it. I’m so glad ‘we’ did it.

Many, many thanks to my lovely husband for doing the planters.

J xx