Charmed, I'm sure

This year, like the past two, I've received a box of plants from Proven Winners to grow as part of their garden writers program. Most of them are varieties that won't be available until next year and it's always fun to give them a trial run. You'll be hearing about more of them as I go into more depth about how I planted my containers this year, but I had to show you one of them.

It's interesting to me. Every year I open the box and get so excited to see all the plants. Some are more exciting to me, and others are more of a well, I'll give it a shot and see what happens. I had the latter reaction to Supertunia Watermelon Charm. I'm sort of ambivalent about petunias to begin with and the "Charm" series have smaller flowers than most petunias.

I planted watermelon charm in the big pot by the front door with coleus, sweet potato vine and papyrus 'King Tut.' It's strange, even though we've had excellent weather (other than the drought, but that doesn't affect containers too much as I'm watering them practically every day anyway), everything seems to be a little slow in getting up to size. So nothing is looking very spectacular yet. Then the other day, seemingly out of the blue, I turned around and Watermelon Charm looked like this:

Note to self: Cut off the floppy King Tut stem. They never stand back up again so if they flop or bend, the only thing you can do is snip them off. Don't worry, there will be plenty to take its place.

She's absolutely awash in hot pink/reddish (the color is very accurately described by the name) blooms that certainly draw your attention. My annual garden awards will wait until fall, but I have to say, Watermelon Charm is getting the "Best out of the gate" award.

In other exciting news:
1. It rained both Sunday morning and Monday morning. Not enough to undo all the damage that has been done by the drought here, but any little bit helps. It allowed me to take a day off from dragging hoses around. I'm trying to give everything a thorough, deep watering once a week, but even with that schedule I'm always watering something.

2. I'm very humbled to be the featured blogger on the Birds and Blooms website. I'm in pretty amazing company there as past featured bloggers have included the amazing Margaret Roach and Gayla Trail from You Grow Girl as well as many other great gardeners (and bloggers). Check it out (and please, somebody take a picture of me standing in the actual garden).