Limited space? Try gardening in containers
Not everyone is blessed to have a large, sunny garden, but even if you’ve only got a postage stamp-sized patio, you can have a vegetable garden by growing in containers.
Contra Costa Master Gardener Terry Lippert has personal experience with containers. She moved from a large, sunny lot to a much smaller, not-so-sunny space. Now she enjoys a robust garden in pots and raised beds and finds there are advantages to her container garden.
For one, she says, she has pots of vegetables growing right on her doorstep, which makes care and harvesting easier and gives visitors a smile. Here are some of her tips:
Choose plants for your n containers based on how much sun you receive. Plants where you will be harvesting tomatoes for example, need spots that have 8 to 10 hours of sun. If the vegetables will be pulled from the ground, such as beets, potatoes and carrots, you’ll need 5 to 6 hours of sun. For leafy greens that you will harvest and eat the leaves, you’ll only need 3 to 4 hours of sunlight each day.
Plants that grow in pots n are dependent on the gardener for their nutritional needs, so starting your plants in a good soil is very important. Lippert has developed her own blend of potting soil that combines equal parts of compost, coconut coir and perlite or vermiculite.
When choosing containers, n avoid dark colors and terracotta. The darker pots can get too hot in the summer sun, and the clay pots dry out too quickly. Almost anything can be made into a container, just make sure that it has good drainage.