What Do I Plant In?

Gardening can be an excellent way to save money, eat healthy, and incorporate more vegetables into your diet. 

The problem with gardening is many people do not have the space or do not live where they can put in a garden that is why patio or container gardening is a great way to garden.

I have lived in apartments for 22-years and have been container gardening for about 5-years now on my apartment patio or balcony, so I know it can be done and done well. I started with herbs, moved to peppers, then to many different veggies.

Recently in the news they said that gardening is the most expensive hobby at this time. I don't believe that unless you are someone who is going out and spending a lot of unnecessary money on items that are truly not necessary to the needs of the plants you are growing.

There are very few things you need to start a patio or container garden. These things are containers, sunlight, water, healthy soil and plants. Over the next few blogs we will talk about these things and then expand from there.

Let’s start with containers. You can use almost anything to plant in, they can be as cheap as can be or as expensive as you want; that is one of the greatest things about container gardening. You literally can grow almost anything in a container as long as it can accommodate the needs of the plant.

You can use plastic, glazed ceramic, wood or self-watering containers. I have seen people use toilets, sinks, trash cans, bushel baskets, bird baths; myself I have used in the past a fish tank that had a leak. I have also seen beautiful and expensive stone planters. You can even purchase “soil socks” that have the perfect soil mix inside a net-type material. You just poke holes, plant your seeds or starter plants and water.

This photo shoes a variety of pots with different plants in them. Most are herbs so they don't need large containers.

This pot is filled with herbs as well and is a very pretty example of beauty meeting practicality.

Two great examples of using space well and re-using old items. Above are rain gutters filled with different varieties of lettuces, herbs and onions. Below is an old over the door shoe holder being used to hold plants. Just fill the pockets with dirt and stuff in the plant!

Below are two examples of using old buckets to grow your veggies in. Don't fill the land fill, re-use for an easy and cheap container idea.

When I saw this photo, I knew I had to use it!! Yes, you are seeing a car being used as a container for a community garden. Just too funny!!

The next four photos are of my self-watering patio garden container that I purchased at Home Depot. The container is 2' X 2', is on wheels for easy moving and has a water reservoir that you fill by pouring water into the black tube you see on the one side. I loved it so much I went back and bought a second one.

You are looking at romaine lettuce and flat leaf Italian parsley in this container.

This container had tomato and peppers in it. This is one of my partial failures. The tomato plants grew so big that I had to move the pepper plants to a new container and I only got a few tomatoes off the plants. Not the containers fault, but the gardeners fault.

Now that you got the idea that you can use almost anything to grow your veggies in lets talk about the plants needs. Although you can grow a veggie in almost anything that doesn't mean that you put 8 tomato plants and 6 pepper plants in a 2' X 2' container like I did. Plants need room to grow and I didn't let mine have room.

Things to keep in mind are that the larger your container, the easier to maintain, but the more difficult to move. So we need to choose where we are going to put a pot before we fill and plant in it. Plants grow toward the sun, so you will need to rotate the plant for even growth. You need to think about the size of the plant at its adult size, not at the seedling size. If you want to plant corn (and you can) or tomatoes which you know are tall plants, do not put them in the container in the front of all your other containers!

The chart below will help with choosing containers; the gallons are a minimum and not a maximum. If the plant you want to grow is not on the chart look for the plant type or a plant similar and use it as a guide, i.e., broccoli and cauliflower would both be a similar plant, so if I wanted to plant a cauliflower I would put one plant in at least a 2 gallon container.

VEGETABLE	CONTAINER SIZE	NUMBER OF PLANTS
Broccoli	2 gallons	1 plant
Carrot	1 gallon (use pots 2 inches deeper than the carrot length	3-4 plants
Cucumber	1 gallon	1 plant
Eggplant	5 gallon	1 plant
Green beans	2 gallon minimum	Space plants 3” apart
Green onion	1 gallon	3-5 plants
Leaf lettuce	1 gallon	2 plants
Parsley	1 gallon	3 plants
Radishes	1 gallon	Space 2” apart
Spinach	1 gallon	2 plants
Squash	5 gallon	1 plant
Tomato	5 gallon	1 plant
Turnip	2 gallon	2 plants

I will end this WAY TO LONG BLOG with some photos of great examples of plant to container size ratio successes.

Eggplants on my patio last year. 

Broccoli  

Cabbages

Carrots

Corn

Sorry this entry is so long, but I wanted to show as many examples of re-cycled containers as well as a good variety as possible. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

Dianna :0)