Ex-Ivy Planter

You may or may not remember the red 3-bucket planter that I bought a while back...I'm pretty sure that never posted a picture, but I bought it one time when I went home with Amrita. Anyway, it's red and has 3 smallish bucket for plants to sit in and be beautiful! I also bought 3 ivy plants (one for each bucket), but now they've almost all died! It's very sad...mostly.

This is all that's left of the ivy...one poor bucket

I've started it growing up
(rather than all over the place)
by wrapping it around a coat hanger.

I've now put a spider baby in the middle bucket.

(This is the only picture I have where you can see the planter)

I'm really not sure what killed the ivy in those 2 other buckets, it's not like they were treated any differently. At the same time, one of the pots grew a couple of plants that I'm unsure about in general. What are they? should I let them grow, or try to kill them? You can see both of them in the picture below. One is the yellower one in the front...it has these little black berries that have mostly dried up and now resemble pepper corns. The other is a little harder to see, in the back. It's the greener one with 'normal' leaf shapes...

Any advice about it?