Love to garden and grow your own vegetables but you don’t have a lot of space and time? Maybe you’re renting, and your place is being sold out from under you (again)? Perhaps you travel or are not around on the weekends to water? Or, you have an existing garden but think that a few potted palms or barrels of drought tolerant, yet colorful succulents would add a finished look to your landscape.
If any of this sounds familiar, I can help you design, choose and maintain a container garden. Whether you decide to grow flowers or other seasonal color, perennials, vegetables, small trees, shrubs or succulents there are many advantages to gardening in large pots or containers.
• Save water by only watering the soil in a container and not an entire area of your garden.
• Customize your soil. If your garden soil is heavy clay or is layered with sandstone, using containers can allow you to choose the exact soil you want to plant in. For example, a rich loamy potting soil would be ideal for flowers and veggies while a sandy mix containing plenty of pumice would make your potted cacti and succulents thrive.
• Fertilizer is not wasted because the food is applied directly to where the plant lives—in the pot.
• If gophers and moles enjoy your garden as much as you do, pots and containers are a sure deterrent to these pests.
• Instead of endless hours of weeding, you can spend your limited gardening time by harvesting the lettuce, carrots, beans and other crops that you’ve grown.
If you don’t have the time or forget to water, a manual or automatic irrigation system can be added to your container garden to assure that it doesn’t dry out.
If you do have to move, you can easily take your garden with you or plan a yard, or rather garden sale.
