Brighten Up Your Front Porch With A Stunning Flower Combo For Your Hanging Baskets

Adding some vibrant hanging baskets is often all it takes to upgrade a dreary and underappreciated front porch to a colorful and welcoming entrance to your home. The best basket combos for your porch depend on a lot of factors, including how much sunlight your porch receives. But if this area offers full sun and is in desperate need of some color, then a few baskets combining petunias and bacopas could be just the ticket for transforming it from drab to fab. 

Both petunias (Petunias x hybrida) and bacopas (Sutera cordata) thrive in full sun and share similar needs. This match isn't just practical though, as the two plants also complement each other visually in hanging baskets, with the smaller, more delicate flowers of the bacopas playing perfectly against the larger and bolder petunia flowers. Both plants also come in a wide range of flower colors, so this floral combination can be customized to fit any color scheme or aesthetic. 

To create your hanging baskets, you can either buy young plants or purchase seeds and start your petunias and bacopas yourself. Be sure to wait until after your last frost to move the plants to an outdoor location, as neither petunias nor bacopas can handle hard frosts. When creating your hanging baskets, avoid putting more than 5 plants into a basket with a 1 foot diameter. It won't take much time at all for the plants to fill out and give you a stunning hanging basket display.

In addition to needing full sun to thrive and flower their best, petunias and bacopas also require moist but well-draining soil and regular applications of fertilizer. In a hanging basket that likely means they'll require daily watering in the summer heat and biweekly fertilizing, as plants in baskets and containers generally lose water and fertilizer more quickly than those grown in the ground. With the right care, you shouldn't have any trouble keeping your petunias and bacopas blooming all season long.

Petunias are available in a wide range of growth habits, from grandiflora types with massive blooms to cascading types which trail beautifully over the sides of baskets. You can easily create a stunning hanging basket from petunias alone, but when you add in the smaller bacopa flowers as well, that can push your design over the top. While petunias are available in almost every color you could think of, from nearly black to subtle lavenders and peachy pinks, bacopas don't have quite the same extensive shade range. They are available in whites, pinks, and purples though, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding colors to either match or complement your petunias' shades.

A basket of 'Betty White' bacopas with pale yellow 'Easy Wave' petunias cascading over the side could add a warm and understated elegance to your porch. While the same white bacopas, paired with bold 'Black Cat' petunias would create an unexpected and elegant contrast. You can even add in other plants that thrive alongside petunias and bacopas to bring additional shapes and textures to your baskets.