Year-round colour: a seasonal planting calendar
A month-by-month guide to what goes in, what comes out, and when to plan ahead so your displays never have a gap.
Continuous colour is not luck. It is two or three planned changeovers a year, booked in advance, with the growing done before the display is needed. Here is roughly how our year runs.
January to March — planning and growing on
Schemes for summer are agreed now and young plants are grown on under cover. This is the right moment to review last year: which positions dried out, which colours worked against your brickwork, where you wished you had more baskets.
April to May — winter displays out, summer in
Winter pansies and violas are cleared and summer baskets go up once the risk of a hard frost has passed. Baskets arrive already established rather than freshly planted, so they look full from day one instead of taking six weeks to fill.
Reliable summer performers
Trailing surfinia petunias, calibrachoa, bidens, geraniums, fuchsia, lobelia and helichrysum for silver contrast. The mix matters more than any single variety — different plants peak at different points, which is what keeps a basket going for months.
June to September — maintenance season
Watering, feeding, deadheading and the occasional replacement. Fortnightly attention is the difference between a display that peaks in July and one that carries through to the end of the season.
October to December — the winter changeover
Summer planting is stripped, compost refreshed and winter schemes go in: pansies, violas, cyclamen, ivy and evergreen structure, with berried stems and cut foliage for the Christmas trade. Winter displays ask far less of you — but they still need checking after hard weather.
Two changeovers a year, planned in advance, and your frontage never has a bare month.
— The Hanging Basket Specialists
Booking early matters more than most people expect. Growing space is finite and the best positions in the schedule go first — we usually confirm summer contracts before the end of February.