Good Plants For Hot Sunny Terraces and Patios

Set the mood, and grow some food

I love collecting pictures of beautiful decks, patios and terraces. I love seeing how people have created inviting spaces and set the mood for the activities that will happen there.

Sometimes the themes are about cozy and quiet space. Others are clearly meant for lively conversation and activity. Some center on cooking food, with BBQ and tables. Others offer a place to lounge, read, or just watch the sky.

One of my paid subscribers asked about plants that are good for direct, strong sunlight. So let’s explore the types of plants that are going to thrive on a sunny patio/deck/terrace and what is needed to keep them thriving all summer long.

What are good plants for direct and strong sunlight? Say, on a terrace maybe 🤔

Light and Heat Conditions

The key determinate of which plants will thrive is how sunny and hot the area will be. Typically sun-loving plants need about 6 hours of good sunlight to be happy.

Parts of my east facing deck actually hold onto sunshine well into the afternoon before the house and nearby trees finally cast shade across the whole thing. That means even on the same deck I have spaces that are quickly shaded (right against the house) vs ones that are significantly sunny and hotter for much of the day.

Think about how many hours of light your space receives, and how much heat accumulates when deciding on your plants.

The heat generated by the sun and certain building materials/colors can have a significant impact on your plants. The hotter the conditions, the more you will need to opt for robust varieties, thick leaves and stems, and bigger pots.

Pots and Potting Soils

While it can look truly beautiful to have many potted plants on display on a deck, the truth is that the maintenance can be a time-killer. Small pots will dry out fast and as the summer heat comes on, may require multiple waterings each day during a heatwave to keep the plants alive.

The hotter and sunnier your space, the larger your pots should be. Not only will the added soil volume help protect the plants’ roots from baking, they can hold water longer which reduces the constant need for care. I like the idea of using a second decorative pot to provide plants with shelter from the direct sun on the one they are rooted in, but I simply keep too many potted plants on the deck right now to make that feasible.

Terraced pots (those that have multiple tiers where the water drains down through all the pots combined), can offer a lot of growing space in the same square footage as having a single pot. Grow towers do the same, but are expensive options. A DIY option is to convert a wooden pallet into a vertical growing space and use it as a green wall or space divider.

Quality, well-draining potting soil is worth the money you will spend. While soils that retain a lot of moisture are fantastic for hot sunny spaces, you also need to consider what happens when it rains. Soils that are too dense and too slow to drain may actually backfire and trigger root rot. I’ve had that happen before and it is disappointing for sure.

High quality potting soil will in theory give you the best combination of moisture retention and drainage. But you can also modify soils yourself. You can add materials like coconut coir, peat moss, hemp fiber, compost and even cotton to improve soil moisture retaining properties. While other materials like perlite, vermiculite, pumice, and sand can help improve drainage.

Some potting soils come with fertilizer already in the bag, so make sure you know if yours has those additives or not. If not (and what I prefer), you will need to feed your plants an organic fertilizer, compost tea, worm castings or other nutrition to ensure good growth throughout the summer.

You don’t necessarily need to buy new soil to fill your pots every year either. I often simply cut off the dead top growth from annuals and store the pots until the following spring. Then I dump all the pots out into a large bin, stir them all up together and break up any root clumps, add a bit of new moisture holding materials, and refill the pots. The only time I don’t save the soil is if the plant had a disease, because you don’t want to be spreading disease spores throughout all your soil! If space is limiting you can dump the soil into a bag or bin for storage and stack the pots up out of the way - that works too.

Color

It turns out that choosing the color of plants for your deck is a key factor in how much you enjoy spending time there. Think again about the when and why you use your deck. If you want to create a cozy quiet space, then you likely want a lot of greenery and a limited number of flower colors like white or blue.

If instead you want a lot of energy in the space, go for high-energy colors like yellow, orange and red.

You can read more about flower color in this post:

Shift Your Mood With Flower Power? (Yes, Actually, Science Says You Can!)

Watering

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of patio plants is keeping them properly watered. When potting soil dries out it tends to pull away from the pot edges. That means the water just runs down the side of the pot and out the bottom, bypassing the roots almost entirely.

The best way to ensure your potted plants are getting enough water is to use a bottom tray for the pot. This allows the potting soil to wick the moisture up into the root zone. Modern pots with water reservoirs work this way too and can be a great (but often expensive) choice for patio plants.

If the soil becomes too dry and resists soaking up water, it is sometimes necessary to put the pot into a deeper tray or bucket of water and let it become fully wetted again. Then moderate your watering to avoid such a total drying out event (which can be deadly for a lot plants).

You can also mulch potted plants to help keep the moisture in, just like you would in a garden setting. The mulch helps to prevent the soil surface from drying out so fast.

I’ll put together a list of watering options for patio and house plants in a future post, including what to do with your plants when you go on holidays.

Food plants for the patio

I love the combination of beautiful flowers and food plants for a deck or patio. These spaces can contribute to a healthy diet in the same way a garden can.

The sun-loving summer food plants are the obvious choice for this purpose. Tomatoes and peppers are the go-to heat lovers, but you can also train cucumbers, beans and even some of the squashes to climb up netting or railings to provide both greenery and food. And of course, potted herbs are the go-to multi-purpose deck plants, providing color, scent and food in one beautiful package.

I prefer to use plants that are going to produce a continuous harvest for decks and patios, which to me makes the most efficient use of the growing space:

• Hundreds of cherry tomatoes vs a few beefsteak tomatoes

• 30 or more sweet Banana peppers vs a few bell peppers

• One hot Thai pepper (which I grow as a perennial - bringing it in for the winter as a houseplant) produces enough peppers for a year’s supply of seasoning.

• Chives produce edible stems and flowers all summer long

• Mint can be tricky to manage in a garden, but in a patio pot provides leaves for food and drinks all season long.

Patio Plants! Cherry tomatoes, Banana peppers, chives, petunias, alyssum (Source: S Senger with Canva Pro)

My current favorite deck plants are ones that have significant potential to add unique foods to my diet. I have citrus (lemon and lime), pomegranates, figs, tea and olives which I bring in out of the cold for winter and return to the deck when the temperatures are right for each plant. The pomegranates and figs drop their leaves so they can be stored in a cool (but not deep freezing) dark space and set out on the deck in the early spring to sprout leaves. The tea and olives are ever-greens so they come inside to my office for winter. And the citrus are the most fussy - and do drop their leaves which can be messy - and need the most consistent heat all year round. they cannot go outside until night temperatures are consistently above 10C (50F).

Curate your plants

I like to think of my deck/patio space as an extension of both my home and my garden - not either/or, but both. My flowers always include some petunias, lobelia, alyssum and herbs like basil and chives. These provide a guaranteed hit of color and draw pollinators the across the patio.

I keep my Thai pepper on the deck, mostly to keep it as far away from my sweet peppers as possible.

This is an aside, but do you know that if you grow hot peppers and sweet peppers side by side that you might inadvertently turn your sweet peppers hot too? That’s because the heat of peppers is mostly in the seeds and if a hot pepper pollinates a sweet pepper, you may end up with hot seeds in a sweet pepper.

I bring my heat-loving food-capable house plants outside to enjoy the sunshine too. I’ll post some pictures later into the summer when it’s warm enough to bring all the plants outside and decide on their arrangement for this year.

Home, garden and sunshine combined, that’s what makes decks, patios and terraces the best places to be.

What’s growing on your deck this year? Share in the comments.