You would think bulk wouuld be the way to go but......... There is 27 cubic feet in a yard. a 2 cf bag of pine fines from walmart is $2.65 a bag so $35.75 a yard. A yard of pine fines from the only spot that sells it is $30. Walmart is 5 miles from my house..the nursery that sells the pine fines is 30 miles. In my case the bulk is more expensive. I don't grow my BB in pots, I grow in the ground. The pots were for a friend that wanted an easier way to grow the blueberries.

If you don't mind sweating a little, you can usually buy a nice playground mix of sand, and a sac of portland, and mix your own in a 5 gallon bucket using an electric drill and mortar bit. Measure how much sand it takes to fill your molds. Use a 1part cement to 2 parts or even 3 parts sand and add water (Will vary greatly on each batch) I make my own pavers and only do 6 at a time, but only mix enough cement for 3 at a time. They are about 15"x15"x21/2" and each one weights approx. 20lbs. I have a few that are 4" thick by 30" and they weigh 120lbs. Not fun to move at all. At 21/2 " and a high portland ratio, a car can drive on them once they are cured. I like making my own mix because I have control of the consistancy, I started out using a pre-mix, and it varies with brands, what size aggregate. Most importantly, you need to use the entire bag each time, as the portland may settle in the bag unevenly. I purchased the sand from a local retail by the yard at about $10 a yard. Portland is cheap also, so my pavers are costing about $1.00 including the cost of the molds($500.00) another thing to remember is that you can always add more water, but not more cement to your mix. MIght also want to think about a release agent for your forms, if you plan on reusing them again.

I struggle here with bulbs (not Gallicas) so don't have the underplantings I'd like. In western Washington state this worked wonderfully. In one bed I had snowdrops followed by hyacinths under the roses and so flowering season began in early spring, not in June. Clematis scrambling through the roses would probably be good, too, if you didn't want to grow them on an obelisk for height. Anita, your roses must be on a flowering similar to mine: earliest roses starting at the end of April, warm-climate roses in May, once-blooming cold hardy old roses starting around mid-May and going on for about a month. Though no, you must get a lot of fall and early spring bloom that we don't have. My once-blooming roses like part shade, as do the Hybrid Musks. I grow my roses in heavy clay and even suckering roses that are off their rootstocks are rarely so aggressive as to become pests (give me a few more years...). Summer drought with no watering may slow them down too. My sunny garden is ugly as sin in the summer as well, and is likely to remain so until I get some flourishing trees and large shrubs going. These will cool the air and give me some shade and summer green. There's just not that much happening once it gets really hot and dry. There's lavender, of course, and it blooms in the summer, and all the aromatic plants for texture and fragrance and foliage color: rosemary, thyme, lavender cotton, teucrium. Possibilities might be late lilies, fall-blooming bulbs (crocuses, colchicums, sternbergia), Japanese anemones. And foliage plants like heucheras that look good even when not in bloom. Oh yes, cyclamen for fall and winter interest. Agapanthus. Clematis. These are plants that I know grow in mild temperate-Mediterranean gardens, as most I have here and some I had in western Washington. Hellebores. I don't know how they'd do in your climate, of course. If you're worried about plants being able to compete with the suckering roses, how about sweet violets, which are very tough as well as beautiful and fragrant? Put all the thugs together in one bed. Melissa

5 is 2 too many. Two very bad pictures and zero measured diagrams isn’t enough to begin to have a clue as to what would actually work.