Container Gardening Designs And Ideas

It's a fact today that a lot of us live in apartments or in townhouses. We don't have an expanse of lovely backyard in which to plant a vegetable garden. Luckily this doesn't mean that you can't enjoy gardening and growing flavorful home grown tomatoes and other vegetables and herbs. All you need is a simple container! You can have containers growing flowers, herbs, shrubs, vegetables, and even small fruit trees. You can use these container gardens for perennial plantings of flowers that will come back year after year or for creating annual gardens.

Container gardening is a great way to grow produce using organic gardening principals. You don't have to worry about landscaping a garden area or composting in your backyard. Creating a container garden is very easy and you won't need a lot of garden tools. We'll show you how to and give you tips about equipment, supplies, soil mixes and seed starting. You can use almost any type of container you want, plastic, rubber, glass, clay, or wood. The sky's the limit. You can create themed container gardens using the same type of containers or have an eclectic collection of containers of different types and sizes. Actually window boxes are thought of as container flower gardening. And you can use any size gardening containers that you want, but keep in mind the final size of the produce or plant that you're growing. You'll want to make sure that it has enough room to thrive. You'll also need to make sure that your container has drainage holes in it. This is probably one of the most important things about vegetable container gardening. You can't allow the roots of anything you're growing to become saturated. They'll rot and the plant will die. If the container you want to use for growing vegetables, flowers, fruit trees or herbs doesn't have drainage holes you'll have to drill them.

The next most important thing is soil. Most master gardeners will suggest that you use a soilless mix. This mixture would be one part sphagnum peat moss and one part vermiculite. Once you've made this soil mixture, then the planting fun can begin! You'll need to fertilize your container gardens on a very regular basis. Soilless mixtures don't contain fertilizer. Generally slow release fertilizer pellets work best.

So you've chosen a containers, made sure they all have drainage holes. You've made a soilless mix. You've considered the final size of what you're growing so it will have enough room for it's root system.

Once you've taken these simple steps you're ready to use your imagination to create an outside container garden. You can place these container gardens on a patio or deck. Place them throughout your yard. Look around at some gardens that you admire. Use it to come up with your own container gardening ideas. You can mimic these gardens by planting the same types of flowers or shrubs in your containers.

Make sure that in your final garden design you give your plants the type of light conditions they need. If you've followed all the above steps and don't follow this one you won't have a successful garden. If your plant requires full sun, make sure you put it in full sun, if it needs shade, put it in shade. Follow the instructions on the plant tag for light recommendations.