Fearless Gardening

This is my gardening theme for this year -- Fearless Gardening!  I found these great purple pots at Tuesday Morning.  And Fearless of critique I decided to plant them up with some tomato plants and put them between the street and sidewalk in front of our house.

potting mix ready

You can see a bit of the purple pot here.  I make up my own potting mix, mixing a bag of cheapo potting soil from Lowes, adding in some perlite, some bagged composted manure, and some shredded pine mulch, and sometimes some compost from my compost piles.

purple pot ready to plant

In go some packing peanuts for drainage.  Packing peanuts seem to last a thousand years -- I save them and reuse for drainage, as they don't make the pots as heavy as when you use shards or stones.  Of course, now it seems most companies are moving away from packing peanuts in deliveries, so my supply has dwindled considerably.  When they run out, I use up-ended small plastic nursery pots that plants I have bought come in.

purple pot placed permanently

And here you see my fearless gardening in all its splendor -- purple pot planted up with a tomato plant and a bright blue tomato cage, placed on some pavers on the median strip between street and sidewalk.  The pavers make a walking space for people to traverse across the median without stepping on my plants.  You can also see my showy primrose, that I have naturalized through a lot of my front yard, along with the mailbox on an antique water pump, that I painted a few years back.  I have four such purple pots with tomato plants along the sidewalk.

Now, I've been told that such garden style is perfectly normal in such places as Portland and Seattle and California.  Or Austin, or even midtown Memphis.  But here in the 'burbs of Memphis, this fearlessness risks the wrath of real estate agents with listings of near by houses, along with residents who suffer from "fear of plants close to a sidewalk" (fortunately none of the folks on my actual street).  I am surrounded by a sea of standard waterhog grass lawns and attendant lawn chemical (ab)use.  But for each hater, there are people that stop me and say how much they like  walk by the house and see what's growing, how it reminds them of _____ (Seattle, Portland, their grandmother's old homeplace, etc), and children that are in awe of the dragonflies and butterflies.  So I continue to garden fearlessly.

Linking to TUESDAY GARDEN PARTY