Are you sure they're eggs and not time-release fertilizer like Osmocote? Hard or soft? Can you squish 'em? Have you seen anything hatch out?

Laguna Hills Nursery always sells bareroot strawberries. Give them a call to find out when they'll get them in. Cheapest way to go, the plants are very inexpensive bareroot. It's a little early yet. At this point they won't fruit until next year anyway. Strawberry pots dry out fast. You get better yield and happier plants when they are in the ground. A raised bed is perfect, and you can make your own raised bed for about the price of one strawberry pot.

The thing that concerns me is the mid-summer sun. Echeverias would look lovely, but they might burn up in the summer, depending on how hot it is there. Mine get cooked in the summer, so I had to move them all to the shade. Aeoniums get huge, and they can burn as well. I would buy needle- leaf or variegated ivies and leave them in their pots (6") and drop them into the planter. In the winter, you can drop red cyclamens in the four inch pots in between the ivies, and when they go dormant in the spring, you can substitute petunias or another colorful bedding annual like portulaca. Another option is Sprenger's asparagus ferns- but beware. The roots expand and you can't get the dang things out without breaking your pot. They drop berries which turn into plants within nanoseconds. I keep mine in plastic pots for this reason. These tough plants will take either full shade or blazing sun. It's just tough to find anything that will thrive in full shade for half the year and full sun for the hot summer months, especially if its roots are being cooked in a black planter. My dad had this problem on his patio- he bought gorgeous (expensive) hand-forged rusted-metal hanging pots, and that summer every plant was cooked in its own little cauldron. Boo. Renee

I used to have goldfish and lipstick plants...until we did our remodel on our last house. They didn't survive their "vacation" in our 24 foot box truck that we stored our furniture in. Mist your plant...they love that. They love humidity and sitting them in a dish of rocks that has water in it will work. They love being in a bathroom...as long as you don't use hairspray. Some people say they have a hard time getting them to bloom. I didn't though. Of course *looking right ** looking left* if you talk to them, they like that too. :)