My Winter/Spring Garden

One advantage of living in metro Atlanta is our warmer winter compared to the often below freezing temperatures with lots of snow while previously having lived in Upstate New York. Whoever thought that one could be a gardener during the winter months?

When our beautiful summer annuals of begonias and petunias had to be uprooted from our window boxes in mid-October, it was time to call back Eugene Cohn, the container garden designer who had helped transpose our small apartment’s covered porch into a delightful mini-botanical garden.

The window boxes get planted with yellow tulip spring bulbs, along with blue and yellow pansies, spinach and parsley.

Adding to the pansies and yellow tulip bulbs I had purchased before her arrival, Eugene added a large dark green spinach plant, plus some parsley that she said, “you can use this for Passover”. In preparing for what she called my winter/spring garden, Eugene pulled out a few small tubers from the window box soil, that came from the sweet potatoes which had sprouted large ivy-like lime green leaves. Small pieces of mulch were spread to become a blanket around the flowers. With her instructions to keep the new plantings moist throughout the winter, my husband will be watering them 3x a week. The special birthday gift of a porch garden from my husband and children in March 2021 continues to give us much joy year-round. It proves that one doesn’t need a large expansive garden to reap the rewards of nature. It’s hard not to feel good when surrounded by a beautiful garden, even it happens to find its home in a container. https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/mini-botanical-garden-birthday-gift/