Organic Herb Garden

We first started using containers for vegetable gardening before we had space for a vegetable garden. However, even when we did finally have space we continued vegetable gardening in containers for some veggies like tomatoes and peppers.

I started my first container garden while living in an apartment. Made great use of the balcony. Once I met the girl I would marry and got married we had to rent our first few homes. We wanted a veggie garden but the owners wouldn’t allow us to dig up the yard so we went with containers and gardened anyways.

We still do container gardening today even though we have a vegetable garden. They opportunity to use other areas of our yard that we don’t want to dig up was just too much so now we have container with veggies growing in those places.

Things You Should Know About Container Gardening

We learned a few things that will help you have better results with less trial and error. We did the trial and error for you so you don’t need to.

1. Buy Containers Large Enough For The Task

A couple of times we thought we had purchased containers that were big enough only to find out our veggies were getting root bound and had to get pots a little bigger. Since then we have learned to always buy the next size larger as that always seems to be the case.

I am not talking about containers to start your veggies in. For that you can use regular pots and then just transplant them into the larger containers once they are big enough.

2. Containers Need To Drain Well

I have to admit that not all of my vegetables survived due to poor drainage in a few containers.

I will admit that most of the time it was me causing the drainage problems due to not putting enough stones in the bottom and eventually the holes in the bottom plugged.

3. Include Perlite As Part Of Your Potting Soil

Perlite, a siliceous rock is a special volcanic mineral which swells to a dozen times it’s original volume when it is heated to a temperature of approximately 871C, about 1600 F. During the heating process, the mineral particles pop like popcorn and form a granular, white snow-like material that is so light in weight it weighs only about 80-128 kg/cubic meter or 5 to 8 pounds per cubic foot.

This allows the material to have a great surface area and to hold moisture which slowly releases back into the soil keeping your plants watered much longer.

4. Veggie Plants Are Going To Need Water

An in-ground vegetable garden can be protected from the heat of the sun and even from evaporation caused by the wind blowing over the ground. One can use different mulches to help moisture from evaporating from the ground which will save water.

It tends to be a little tougher in containers as there are more factors involved. They can heat up really fast, cooking the roots and killing the plant. The water can evaporate much faster than most people think.

This is where perlite will come in very handy in keeping your containers watered. You can also use a drip irrigation system. They seem to work well and give the gardener control over how much water is used.

Keeping your containers on the lawn will keep them cooler than leaving them in the driveway or on dirt. It’s a fact that the temperature at lawn level is several degrees cooler than the breeze moving across dirt or pavement.

5. Vegetable Container Gardens Can Be Relocated

This wasn’t the case with my balcony vegetable garden but for our veggie container garden in the places we rented we moved our containers around to take full advantage of the sun.

We have had a lot of fun with our container gardens and really they were pretty easy to maintain, although we had to learn a couple of things. Any mistakes we made were mostly fixable.

When I initially began it was tomatoes in a container garden, and next we added peppers and even strawberries.

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