Gardening Basics

Plan Your Container Garden For All Seasons!

Posted by Tom Johnson

The first thing you need to decide when planning a container garden is whether you’d prefer to grow your plants indoors or outdoors. A lot of people think container gardening is only for indoor growing and patios, but containers can actually be useful for any garden situation.

By planting your garden in containers, it becomes much easier to move around to get the best possible conditions for your crops. This is an obvious advantage over a traditional garden!

Your traditional garden has to endure any bad weather that occurs. If you grow in containers they can be moved to a safer location away from the weather when necessary.

Also your potted garden can be moved around to take advantage of the best growing conditions for your plants. That’s not possible once your plants are in the ground and you find that the position you picked is either too shady or sunny.

Putting your container garden outside gives you a number of options. You can pick a spot that gets the right amount of sunlight and at the same time gives you easy access, this will give your plants and you a lot to smile about. The fastest way to lose interest in your garden is to place it in a difficult, hard to reach location!

Pollution from road traffic is to be avoided as much as possible by planting your garden as far away from the street as possible. This will reduce the amount of contamination to your plants and in turn reduce the effects of pollution on your family when they eat some of your produce.

If you have your plants indoors, you’ll need to be sure to select a very good spot. Most plants need to be fairly warm, so you’ll need to choose the warmest spot in your house if you use air conditioning.

If your home tends to be on the cool side, try and find a room where you can close off any vents or drafts and keep it a little warmer. A room filled with natural sunlight is usually better for them.

Some plants thrive better in higher humidity, and others do well in lower humidity. You may need to invest in special equipment to adjust the humidity if you’re raising very delicate or picky plants. You probably won’t have to do this unless you’re growing exotic varieties.

Having said that, you should choose varieties of edible plants that you can’t readily get at your local store at cheap prices. When selecting the plants you want to grow, it’s better to pick a few of the harder to get ones than trying to grow too many varieties… this just leads to frustration and disappointment.

Stick to growing fruits and vegetables that you really enjoy and have a hard time locating locally, or those you find too expensive or too low quality. Tomatoes are a favorite for home gardeners, because their quality in stores if often very poor.

A final consideration is if you would like your container garden to be organic. Indoors it’s fairly easy to do, but outdoors, in an uncontrolled environment, it can be harder to control pests. All you have to do is take some time to learn the best organic methods for your garden and you’ll be really happy with the results.

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