Domesticated Diva: Home Sweet Home: Planting a Beautiful Container Garden 101

Since me and Mr. Domesticated Diva are brand new homeowners, I've decided to start posts dealing with home DIY, gardening, and interior design! Please look out for posts labeled "Home Sweet Home" for home and garden inspirations.
It is warming up in Houston, so what better way to spend a nice weekend than working on the yard. I absolutely love container gardens. They are great for small spaces and can make a dramatic statement.

I bought this absolutely gorgeous Texas theme flower pot at HEB. It was only $20 with a $5 coupon, and it is fairly large! Make sure you choose a pot with a drainage hole.

I bought an assortment of 4 different plants. All are flowering plants.

Here are the plants I selected:
Bulbine: Native to desert grasslands in South Africa, this plant grows well in a well-drained soil and is also very tolerant of poor, dry soil. Bulbine grows best in full sun, has succulent foliage, and produces racemes of star-shaped yellow with orange flowers in the summer months.
Blue Dwarf Katie Ruellia: Large lavender-blue flowers are backed by narrow, dark green foliage. Drought tolerant when established. Herbaceous perennial.
Becky Mix Rudbekia: Gloriosa Daisy hybrids are short-lived perennials, sometimes treated as annuals. Often these will survive a few winters, or at least self seed. This compact strain produces large black-eyed daisy flowers for months on end, in a wide range of shades from yellow through gold, orange and bronzy-red.
Grace Ward Lithodora: Beautiful, deep blue flowers cover this wonderful groundcover or rock garden accent. Sprawling with a slightly mounded form. Likes some shade in extremely hot areas.

The Bulbine is a taller plant, the Blue Dwarf Katie Ruellia and Becky Mix Rudbekia are low lying flowering plants, and the Grace Ward Lithodora is a crawling/trailing flowering plant. It's good to mix and match different flowers, so that your arrangement is unique and complex. Many people think that container gardens have to all be the same flower, but it doesn't! Here's some great container garden arrangement from Better Homes and Gardens

I used almost a whole bag of 2 cubic feet of Miracle Grow Garden Soil. Make sure to space the flowers accordingly. Water the flowers thoroughly after planting. I placed the container near our front door.