Regarding your first idea, you know that the tangent point lies somewhere on the known circle, so one way to proceed is to take an arbitrary point on this circle and compute the externally tangent circle with center on the given line. The center of this second circle is colinear with the tangent point and center of the known circle, so you can find it by computing the intersection of two lines. Tangency to the line $y+2=0$ means that the unknown circle’s radius must be equal to $|y_c+2|$, where $y_c$ is the $y$-coordinate of that circle’s center. This will give you an equation for the possible tangent points.
You don’t need to compute the point of tangency explicitly, though. The line segment from the center of the unknown circle to this point is a radius of that circle. The two centers and the tangent point are colinear, so its length is equal to the distance between the centers of the circles, plus the radius length of the known circle. So, the center of the unknown circle is a point on the line $x-2y+4=0$ such that this distance is equal to the distance to the line $y+2=0$, i.e., $|y+2|=1+\sqrt{x^2+(y-1)^2}$. This gives you two equations in two unknowns.