Mexican Pots For Our Arizona Home

Last month, I ventured my personal blog into highlighting a recent project I undertook which was to upgrade my irrigation system. This month, I continue with the landscaping theme by sharing our newest addition to our landscaping, Mexican planting pots. Living in Arizona, a popular landscaping item used to add color and depth to our desert views is Mexican planting pots. After several trips with my daughter, Amelia, looking for the perfect pots, we eventually found several at a local store that would accent our new landscaping well.

My mother, who has two of the greenest thumbs I know, would be proud that her son and granddaughter are carrying out her landscaping tradition. Below, I highlight the plant choices for our new Mexican pots as well as photos of each pot.

To also continue the irrigation theme of last month’s article, these Mexican pots are now tied into our new irrigation system. Yet to the outside observer, it would be hard to see as all the irrigation lines are hidden. That is because we buried new landscaping lines to each pot and then ran a smaller 1/4 inch waterline through the drainage hole in the bottom of each pot extending them through the soil all the way to the top of each pot. At the top of the 3 leaning pots, you will soon see, we added a nozzle to spray water over the plants. For the other pots, we added soaker hoses to distribute water evenly around the base of each plant. Now let’s check out the pots!

We will start with my personal favorite, a 4-foot-tall Mexican pot that now sits just outside our front door. During my research for this project, I learned that larger pots should highlight 3 important items: a thriller, a filler, and a spiller. For this pot, the thriller we used is a Foxglove, the filler is a Brilliant Azalea and the spiller is Ornamental Grass.

The next size pot sits in my backyard on the north side of our patio. This is a complicated location because it gets the most shade out of all our planting pot locations. During my research for selecting plants, I read that blueberries grow well in Arizona but some sources say they love the sun and others say they like shade. To test the shade theory, I planted a Blueberry Bush in this pot along with a Foxglove and a Foxtail Fern. We have several Foxtail Ferns integrated into our landscaping throughout our front and backyards. I felt adding a Foxtail Fern here would continue that theme.

The last of our large pots sits in our backyard. This pot gets the most sun so I am testing another Blueberry Bush here along with a Lavender and Ornamental Grass.

Back in our front yard, we added our first of 3 leaner pots (my wife Layla loves these pots that lean). Leaner pots give the illusion of being partially buried. Technically, these pots are flat on the bottom but we will keep that our little secret. This leaner pot includes an Alaskan Azalea and a Blue Freesia.

On the south side of our backyard, we added to our leaner pot we placed there a Spanish Lavender and Carnation. This pot is shaded by a block wall and our home so plants here will get partial sun in the late afternoon.

By the time we finished installing all the pots, our last pot left me working in the dark. This leaner pot sits directly outside our back patio so I wanted to make sure it contained beautiful plants. So here we planted a Carnation and a Freesia.

Now we must sit back and see how our new outdoor potted plants perform. We will wait to see how well the location of these plants works and how well they thrive. Questions left to be answered are whether there will be just enough or possibly too much water, enough, too much, or too little sun, and whether the plants will grow planted together or whether they will eventually crowd each other out.

I know some adjusting will take place and not all plants will survive. Hence, this is why I grabbed my camera to document how well they looked back when. Several of our neighbors have already stopped by complimenting us on the new pots and that makes this ‘greenhorn’ green thumb very happy!