Patio Gardening

Patio gardening is something you'll find easy to do if you follow a few simple rules:

To begin with, use as large a pot as you can afford. The larger the pot, the more soil you can fill it with, and the better the plants will grow.

Larger pots hold more water and this reduces the stress on the plant (not to mention the gardener who has to water smaller pots twice a day in the summer's heat).

You can get more or bigger plants into larger pots and this allows you to design or create masterpieces that will live (as opposed to using smaller pots where the plants are crowded and eventually die of disease or competition.

Soils

Use an artificial soil such as Pro-mix from top to bottom of the pot in your patio gardening efforts.

The first part of that - the artificial soil - is because it is designed to be used in containers. If you use real soil from your garden, it will compact under the pressure of repeated waterings and will turn to concrete by the middle of the summer. No tender plant root is going to survive and grown (never mind thrive and bloom heavily) in concrete soils.

The second part - from top to bottom - means that you don't need drainage bits, like old clay pots, at the bottom of the pot. Putting bits and chunks of stuff at the bottom of the pot does not help drainage. In fact, it hurts drainage. This old wive's tale has been around for quite a whille.

Container Gardening Video

Feeding

Feed your patio gardening containers

Doug's first rule of gardening states, “That it is only necessary to feed your plants if you want them to grow leaves, flowers or fruit.”

I use compost tea on most of my containers at least every two weeks; compost tea provides all the micro-organisms that help protect my plants and enable them to really grow well.

On alternate weeks, I use a fish food emulsion that provides all the micronutrients that are lacking in the artificial soils.

Both the compost tea and the fish emulsion provide needed nutrients for growth, flowers and fruit. You can use a regular house-plant food (look for a balanced formula like 20-20-20) at least weekly if you don't use compost tea or fish emulsion. If you choose to do nothing and don't feed your containers then your plants will respond accordingly.




Lemon Verbena

Style

Get a good looking pot I know that some of you really like plastic pots but for the most part, they look like plastic. And gardens are not plastic, they are organic and growing (plastic is inert and dead). Gardens breathe and change, plastic sits and shatters in the sun.

Use pots that reflect your garden (mind you, if your garden features a lot of plastic flowers or silk flowers - then plastic pots might work). I grow a lot of perennials and unusual plants and I almost exclusively use clay pots.

I have used brown fibre pots on occasion and I confess my water garden pot is plastic (I'm working on a way to disguise this fact) so I can't toss stones around.

I do have a clay water garden pot (stopped up the hole with a glue gun) though. The rest of my patio gardening pots (over 20 at last count) are various sized clay pots. The hens' and chick's sit in small six inch pots while the others get larger twelve and sixteen inch pots.

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