Long before she became a horticulturist, Jenny Zinniker ’22 spent much of her life in and around gardens. She grew up on a farm, where her mother kept “a fairly substantially sized garden,” she says. She went to environmentally oriented schools, and as a UW student, she was the director for The People’s Farm, a student organization that grows fruits and vegetables in the Eagle Heights Community Gardens.
After a spell living in Germany, where she worked in a cuckoo-clock shop (“I did not have a desire to bring one into my own home,” she admits), she returned to campus and is now on the team at Allen Centennial Garden, where she makes sure that the various beds and containers show off the beauty and bounty of the season. Here are her pro tips for growing late-summer containers.
1. Start in August.
Use the first frost date of fall in your location and reference the date to maturity on your seed packets. Then you can count those days backward from the first frost date to calculate when you should start your seeds. You may want to add a week or two as a buffer. End of July to mid-August is a typical time to start fall veggie crops, but some things with short growing windows can also be started later.
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Make a Gift2. Know your bloom cycles.
Some plants have a long development, so you’ll have to start them early if you want them to bloom before the first frost.
3. Get a mix.
Last year, I did chrysanthemums, asters, creeping jenny, ornamental peppers, and ornamental kale. The pink insides of kale go well with the purple of asters.
4. Be mindful of escapees.
I should caution anyone who wants to grow creeping jenny. It spreads very aggressively. If you plant creeping jenny, it should only be in a container. Don’t put it in the ground. I don’t want anyone to think, for fall displays, you should get creeping jenny and put that everywhere. That is not good gardening advice. Lysimachia nummularia is classified as invasive in Wisconsin. That said, there is a golden color cultivar, Aurea, a.k.a. Golden Creeping Jenny, that is exempt from DNR invasive-species restrictions and is “suitable for judicious use in ornamental plantings,” according to the [UW] Extension.
5. Don’t get uptight about thrillers, fillers, and spillers.
Thriller, filler, spiller, is a good base philosophy for container design. I personally do use this concept in a lot of my pots. But container gardening is creative. You may want something with height, something showy, but you should mix it up with your containers so that the whole of them together looks really nice. People should take liberties to experiment with many types of container designs. It is all subjective and varies with the pots being used.
6. If you’re feeling really creative, consider a theme.
One thing we’re doing this year is a moon garden. It’s got a lot of white flowers, because they reflect more moonlight, but also night bloomers and flowers that attract nighttime pollinators.
7. Water in the morning
Mornings are ideal. If things get too wet late in the day, then overnight, you can get bacteria growth.
