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Container Gardening

With little or no land available in most apartment situations, those of us who like to garden turn to containers. But unlike land-based gardening, container gardening comes with a special set of challenges, as well as advantages. What are your tips in solving some of those challenges? Are there any special suggestions for keeping your container garden "green"? What types of plants thrive in containers, and which are best left to the land-based gardeners?

Tags: apartment, container gardening

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Permalink Reply by Beth Mulcahy on January 25, 2010 at 12:06am: Hi Melanie!
I too am working with the challenge of apartment gardening. I have tried container gardening outside and while it worked in the sense the plants did well, unfortunately the lawn maintence company the apartment complex uses has no clue what a weed is and they use weed wackers on EVERYTHING. With 3 attempts at it and 3 killings by ignorant lawn crews my fiance has put his foot down and refuses to try again until we have an enviroment we can control. Right now the inside is too packed to have an effient garden and the cat is too possesive of the window sill to share. But this is not my first apartment so here is what I have learned from previous apartment gardening experiments. Save your old roasting pans and if your pet goldfish dies, after buring it in the garden, reuse the rocks for the roasting pan. I used to put my terra cotta pots in those rock filled roasting pans and put some water in it for humidity. It helped the plants from dehydrating if you are an absentminded waterer like me.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Beth Mulcahy on January 26, 2010 at 1:14pm: As for plants that do good in containers; tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, potatoes, squash, carrots, and herbs have been successful for me. You can pretty much put most vegetables in containers, you just have to keep in mind how they grow when picking out a container. For example, beans and peas have shallow roots and are verticle growers so they do well in shallow pots so long as they have a framework to climb up on. Root vegetables like potatoes and carrots obviously need deep containers for the roots to grow down. Carrots do well in narrow deep containers while potatoes grow good in barrels which are wide and deep. The best thing to do before growing any plant is to research it and learn how big it gets and how much space it needs to grow healthy so you can pick out the correct container. Also, become friends with the local fishing fanatic, leftover fish bits and worms are great for container gardens and it's cheaper to use fish scraps that buying fish emulsion.; ▶ Reply to This