Kerri from Colors of the Garden is the star guest blogger today as she shares of her passion with fuschias. I've really enjoyed conversing with Kerri over the past year and she epitomizes what blogs are about - they really are just an international cyber-fence that we can hang our heads over and have a natter. If you haven't met Kerri (or her husband Ross) yet, pour yourself a cuppa and spend some time delving through her archives. They're all as good as this one...

Stuart has generously offered to give me the run of his blog, in a guest post, while he’s off gallivanting in Tasmania. I thought, “Why not? I haven’t had a trip to my beloved birth country since 2003, and I’ve never been to Western Australia. If I can’t go physically, at least I can have a virtual trip”. So here I am!

My first thoughts were of the glorious gardens my mother used to grow, and specifically, her magnificent fuchsias.

Mom lived in Palm Beach, NSW during my teen years, and then later at Nelson Bay in Port Stevens, NSW. She had the greenest thumb imaginable, and grew a great deal of her plants from cuttings.

She had many different fuchsias. Some in hanging baskets, some in containers and others in the ground, almost all grown from cuttings. The plants in the ground grew into very large shrubs, up to 6ft tall, laden with beautiful ballerina-like blooms dancing from gracefully arced boughs.

Unless one is lucky enough to have a greenhouse over here in our Northeastern United States climate (we are just barely in zone 5…surrounded by zone 4), we must buy our fuchsias in hanging baskets or containers from plant nurseries early in the spring.

The hard part is deciding which variety to buy. I make myself stick to one basket of fuchsia because there are so many other plants I want as well. For the past 3 years I’ve chosen ‘Marinka’, a red variety, for its vigorous growth habit and the fact that hummingbirds adore it. And for the most part, I’ve had really good luck with it.

But then there’s that gorgeous pale pink, with a hint of green on the tips that I fell in love with last year. Or the purple and red combination, or “Swingtime”, which is red and white, or…..well, you get the picture. I have a little trouble making up my mind….and this is just the fuchsia! I still have all those other plants to decide on. A trip to the nursery can become a long, drawn out affair for me.

If I’m lucky, and don’t kill the plant by under or over watering, I can enjoy about 4 or 5 months of lovely blooms. As a rule, we don’t get a great deal of hot weather during our short summers, but I find it’s best to move the fuchsia out of the afternoon sun if the day is a hot one. I just move it over one hook, from the edge of the porch roof, to underneath the roof. And I usually need to water it morning and night in very hot weather, because the container dries out very quickly. I’ve found that if I feed it about every 10 days with Bloom Booster flower food (15-30-15) it will produce blossoms continually all summer.

As the cold weather approaches I’m always very reluctant to let the container plants suffer their fate of being killed by a frost, so I carry them back and forth between the inside and out until it gets to be too much of a chore. But this winter was unusually mild until half way through January, and the fuchsia and several other plants survived on our enclosed side porch all that time. When the temperatures finally began dipping to freezing and below I brought the plants inside and put them upstairs in a spare bedroom by a sunny window.

I cut the fuchsia back, and was surprised to see a few blooms on it during these last couple of months. It’s looking very healthy, which leads me to believe that I might end up with another season’s worth of enjoyment from this plant. What a bonus!

And just think, around Mother’s Day I’ll be able to treat myself to a brand new fuchsia, feeling free this year to choose one of those other wonderful varieties

I certainly would love to be able to grow 6 ft high fuchsias like my mother did though. Perhaps I could do it vicariously through Stuart. I’ll have to talk to him about that when he gets back from his trip.