Container Vegetable Gardening 101
Chris Colby, an avid gardening from Bastrop, Texas, has some excellent tips for container gardening. It doesn’t matter if you’ve only got a small area for gardening; it’s easy to have a very productive bunch of containers by just following some simple, but tried and tested methods that Chris recommends.
Just select your containers that best suit your needs and budget, grab some potting mix, compost if available, a bit of fertilizer and get planting!
Happy gardening!!
Build a container garden for vegetable gardening using full sun perennials and root vegetables.
A privacy fence serves as one side of these small container boxes. A yard doesn’t need a lot of room in order to hold boxes filled with delicious produce.
Freshly harvested garden vegetables — you can’t beat ’em. You might think you need a good garden spot to grow them, but you don’t; you can grow delicious vegetables in containers almost anywhere. For people who live in the city, or even in an apartment with a deck, a container garden can supply fresh vegetables during gardening season.Pick perfect containers
When planning an in-ground garden, you first decide on the layout. With a container garden, you can worry about that later, since the containers are movable. As the growing season progresses, you can arrange them to account for changes in the patterns of sun and shade, or if one plant begins to shade another.
Choose the right container
From the standpoint of plant health, the best solution is to select a container large enough so the roots just barely reach the sides and bottom when the plant reaches maturity. However, for most vegetables, this would require large containers and limit the amount of plants you could grow in a given area. In practice, you can grow vegetables in containers that restrict root growth somewhat, as long as you pay attention to watering and fertilization.
The depth of the container should be roughly equal to the diameter. For example, many garden guides suggest spacing tomatoes 4 feet apart in a row. This would suggest that a 2-foot-diameter planter would be adequate. I have grown tomatoes multiple times in 22-inch-diameter pots (just shy of 2 feet), and the plants have grown large and healthy. For sprawling plants, you may need to experiment to find an appropriately sized container.
Types of containers
Nurseries and big box stores sell all sorts of planters — from clay, to plastic, to wood. Used wine barrels are also frequently sold as decorative planters. The plastic planters are by far the cheapest, but be aware that the plastic will become brittle and break down after a few years in the sun. Once they crack, you can usually get one more year of service out of them by sealing the crack with duct tape.
Drainage is key
If you follow the sizing advice above, the roots of your plants are going to be constrained. They will grow to the edge and bottom of the container, and then bunch up. The matrix they grow in needs the best drainage possible, which will allow you to water and “feed” the plant efficiently.
Fill each container with good-quality potting mix or another soil-like medium with excellent drainage. Actual soil — even rich garden soil — is usually not a good choice unless your containers are large and only minimally restrict the root systems. Also, soil is heavier than potting mix and makes a container more difficult to move.
Compost is good food for plants, but too much in a container slows drainage. If you use compost in your containers, make compost tea and use it to “feed” the plants.
Soak the mix
When it’s time to water, soak the container so every bit of the potting mix is wet. You’ll know this has occurred when water begins seeping from the drainage holes. Immediately after watering, every root hair in the pot should have access to water. Don’t water again until the top 1/2 to 1 inch of potting mix has dried out. Potting soil changes from black to dull gray when it dries, so this is easy to spot. And, of course, keep an eye on the plants for signs of water stress, including leaf rolling and wilting. When you water again, completely soak the container.
Fertilizing
Growing veggies in containers cramps the root system, and the volume of water and nutrients they are absorbing is reduced. Compensate for this by fertilizing the plants. The best way is to regularly add diluted mixtures of water-soluble plant fertilizer. Use “regular” liquid or granular plant fertilizer, or organic fertilizers like compost tea, seaweed extract or fish hydrolysate.
Mix up some plant fertilizer to a fraction of the strength recommended by the manufacturer, but use it more frequently than recommended. In other words, spread the addition of the fertilizer out over time. For example, if the mixing instructions are to use 1 cup of fertilizer once a month, try adding 1/4 cup every week, or 1/2 cup every two weeks. You’ll end up feeding the plant the same amount, just not in big, infrequent doses. Give the plant just as much as it needs as it goes along. Make notes to refer back to in future years, and you’ll find what works best in your situation.
Tie it all together
The smaller the containers, relative to what’s best for the plant, the more work it will be to keep it watered and fed properly. Save a lot of headaches by starting with the biggest containers you have room for and filling them with straight potting mix.
Properly tended, a container garden can yield a bounty of vegetables comparable to what an in-ground garden with the same number of plants would deliver.
