Container Gardening

Container gardening is a quick and easy way to grow anything from pansies to tomatoes to small fruit trees almost effortlessly and with no back breaking garden work involved! Container gardening is just what it's name implies, gardening in a container.

Use the container of your choice. It can be of any type of material, plastic, metal, clay, porcelain, wood or glass. You may want to have a theme running through your container garden. Perhaps all the same size clay pots, but painted in different colors, or a variety of sizes of wood containers. I've seen container gardens in big rubber boots, and even old toilets! Wooden half barrels make great container gardens. 

One of the beauties of container gardening is that you can have a container garden indoors as well as outside. Window boxes are considered container gardening. You can have urns on your patio spilling over with lovely flowers, or you can grow vegetables, such as tomatoes, and herbs in a container on the patio, within easy reach of the kitchen.

It's easy to come up with design ideas for a container garden, especially since you don't need to do any landscaping. You'll need very few tools once you have the basics done. Here is a good tip - container gardening lends itself very well to organic management.

The first thing you'll need is of course containers. You'll always need to keep the final growing size of your plant in mind when choosing the container, you want your plant to be able to thrive. The container will need plenty of drainage holes. It's always certain death to any plant when you have roots sitting in water.

After you have the container ready you need soil. Most container gardening experts recommend a soilless mixture. A soilless mixture is simply a combination of equal parts peat moss and vermiculite or perlite.

Once you have your plants in their containers the next step is to ensure that you place the container where it will get optimal light for the health of your plant. This is another very important step. A plant that calls for shade needs shade. A plant that need sun will not thrive in the shade.

Water as needed, and fertilize weekly.

It's as simple as that. Having a container garden is a fun learning project to share with your children. They love planting small tomato plants and watching them grow and then being able to harvest and eat them.