Watering Tips for Heat-Stressed Hanging Baskets

Sheri Harrah:

I am Sheri Harrah, with HomeShow Garden Pros. Hanging baskets. They can be extremely difficult in our area, in the Gulf Coast region to maintain through the hot, hot summer. So first, we need to understand what the plant is trying to tell us. So this obviously is a sad hanging basket. It’s wilted. It’s discolored. It was beautiful a month ago, but now the heat is on and we have to start watching our plants for cues of stress.

So hanging baskets by nature when you water them, nutrients flush out of the bottom. So we have to feed our hanging baskets way more aggressively to get this beautiful, thriving hanging basket. So watching for water cues and feeding are what we’re talking about today. Invest in a good water wand so you don’t have to pull the basket down to water it. A watering can is not going to be sufficient. When you water your basket, you want to put the water wand in the basket until the basket is draining out of the bottom, and then go do something else for a second, and then come back and water again until it’s coming out of the bottom. Sometimes I’m watering my baskets every day, maybe twice a day, if we’re super windy. If you’re going on vacation, put your baskets on the ground so that they’re not in the wind and drying out as fast.

Now about feeding. You want to do a granular and a liquid every month, so something like this Color Star is great, and I’ll show you exactly how to do it. You sprinkle it right in the basket and then you’ll mix up your Super Seaweed in a watering can and water it in. So feeding it and stimulating the roots at the same time as the dynamic duo in our hanging baskets. So you can have beautiful baskets, you just have to work a little bit harder, but you can definitely do it. Enjoy.