Our building sits on a corner site, with not a lot of garden space. The western wall gets really hot at the end of the day, so I wanted to grow some Virginia Creeper up the side, to shade things and keep it cool. Virginia Creeper is native to this area and really pretty.
Digging out part of the sidewalk was an option, but because we own neither a jackhammer, nor steel-toed boots, we would have had to hire someone to do it.
On one of my auction forays, I came across this very large feed trough. I'm almost certain that it's big enough that the plants won't freeze completely in the winter (they need mass to stay warm, which is why small containers are planted with annuals), and it looks cool besides!
After punching some holes in the bottom for drainage (a surprisingly noisy job), we situated it to catch the sunlight and also cover up last year's tagging.
Steve down at the Sebringville Garden Centre told us that, because it's to stay on the sidewalk, we needed to get some weight in the bottom. If we were putting it on our deck, we would have wanted to keep it as light as possible, but the sidewalk(and possible damage from passersby) required a fair bit of weight. So in went a bunch of stuff I wasn't really looking forward to paying to take to the dump (nothing noxious, just heavy). Then we put in some topsoil and finally the nice potting soil we'd bought from Steve. The two Virginia Creeper plants seem very happy there and have almost filled the pot and started climbing up the bricks already.
I'll be adding more around the building as I find suitable containers.
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