Planting Flowers

For those readers who have been waiting with baited breath for a Toad Valley post, I apologize for not posting last week.  My sweet mother-in-law passed away from this earth, so I took the week to reflect and support my husband and his family.  Since she was a lover of flowers, I thought I’d share all the flowers we have been planting around the golf course in her memory.

The first chore of planting flowers is always cleaning up from the winter.  We have to till the ground and prepare all the pots for planting.  Many of our pots get stored away for the winter.  For some reason, empty flower pots attract cigarette butts.    Niko and Theresa got busy positioning all the flower pots around the clubhouse and up at the miniature golf course.

Theresa added some potting soil and fertilizer to the pots before planting them.  We filled all the pots that are in the shade with impatiens.  They do well in shady areas and have lots of beautiful color!

Once the pots were filled up with fresh compost and fertilizer, Theresa got to planting.

She planted and planted and planted over several days.

She also planted the pots that are along the deck of the conference center as well as the big sign at the front of the clubhouse.  We decided to go with red for this year.  Lots of bright primary colors caught our eye.

Her favorite thing to plant is the golf bags.  Last year, Theresa and I were on a plane together on the way to a golf convention in Las Vegas.  We were turning pages in a magazine when we ran across this picture of flowers planted in old golf shoes.  That got our brains turning.  We had many old golf bags hanging around the clubhouse.  They seemed like they’d be the perfect planter!  She spray painted the bag bright blue and painted the pull cart green to complete the look.

We also have many beds around the clubhouse that needed planting.  Our flower of choice is wave petunias.  They are incredibly hardy and spread well.

We plant about 20 flats of these wave petunias, so they should be really pretty once they get filled in.

Here is a shot of one of the planters that we planted at the miniature golf course.  You can see from this picture that we were about ready to get a nice downpour of rain.

It seemed like we had just gotten all the flowers planted in the ground when the skies opened up and poured rain.  It was the perfect ending to a flower planting day!  How about you?  What’s your favorite flower?