Container gardening can create a natural sanctuary on a busy city street, along rooftops, or on balconies. You can easily accentuate the welcoming look of a deck or patio with colorful pots of annuals, or fill your window boxes with beautiful shrub roses or any number of small perennials. Whether you arrange your pots in a group for a massed effect or highlight a smaller space with a single specimen, you’ll be delighted with this simple way to create a garden.
Container gardening enables you to easily vary your color scheme, and as each plant finishes flowering, it can be replaced with another. Whether you choose to harmonize or contrast your colors, make sure there is variety in the height of each plant. Think also of the shape and texture of the leaves. Tall strap-like leaves will give a good vertical background to low-growing, wide-leaved plants. Choose plants with a long flowering season, or have others of a different type ready to replace them as they finish blooming.
Choosing Your Garden Containers
When choosing containers for your plants, you’ll want to buy them all at once along with some extras in case they break or you add more plants later. You don’t want all the containers to be all the same shape and size, but definitely, the same style so that they complement each other. Plastic containers are the best for container gardening and require the least amount of watering, but if you want to stick with clay or earthen pots then you should line the inside with plastic. This helps it retain water more, as the clay will soak up water.
Experiment with creative containers. You might have an old porcelain bowl or copper urn you can use for container gardening, or perhaps you’d rather make something really modern with timber or tiles. If you decide to buy your containers ready-made, terracotta pots look wonderful, but tend to absorb water. You don’t want your plants to dry out, so paint the interior of these pots with a special sealer available from hardware stores.
Cheaper plastic pots can also be painted on the outside with water-based paints for good effect. When purchasing pots, don’t forget to buy matching saucers to catch the drips. This will save cement floors from getting stained, or timber floors rotting.
Garden Container Soil
Always use a good quality potting mix in your containers. This will ensure the best performance possible from your plants. Consider composting and using fertile soil right from your yard derived from your kitchen scraps. This will make your container gardening fully sustainable.
Another thing to remember when buying pots for container gardening is the fact that the size of the pot will ultimately constrict the size of the plant. Make a careful choice of pots according to what you wish to grow in each one. If you search for the plant you chose on the internet, you should be able to find specifications as to how much root space it should be given. This can even be an advantage for you if you choose a plant that can grow very large. If you only have a limited amount of space for it, you can constrict it by choosing a pot that isn’t large enough to support huge amounts of growth.
The maintenance of container gardening takes slightly more time since you have to water more often and go around to each individual container. However, the square footage for container plants is much less than that of an actual garden, so the time spent on maintenance and watering is more balanced. It is important that you don’t over-water your container plants, as this can be just as fatal to their health as under-watering.
Placing Your Garden Container
A benefit of growing in small containers is the fact that you can move them around to suit your needs. If you rearrange your furniture and you think that it would look nicer if it was in the other area, it’s no trouble at all to scoot it over. As long as the lighting is about the same, your plant shouldn’t mind the transition at all. Another benefit of container gardening versatility is the fact that you can adapt them to simulate any environment depending on the type of soil you fill it with and where you place it.
If you have steps leading up to your front door, an attractive pot plant on each one will delight your visitors. Indoors, pots of plants or flowers help to create a cosy and welcoming atmosphere.
If you have plenty of space at your front door, a group of potted plants off to one side will be more visually appealing than two similar plants placed each side. Unless they are spectacular, they will look rather boring.
Group the pots in odd numbers rather than even, and vary the height and type. To tie the group together, add large rocks that are similar in appearance and just slightly different in size. Three or five pots of the same type and color, but in different sizes also look effective.
Trendsetting with Garden Containers
With a creative mind and some determination, you will soon have a container garden that will be the envy of friends and strangers alike.
