Container Gardens

General Container Gardening

Creating a container garden is a wonderful way to make use of spare patio, deck or balcony space. It's also an excellent way to have a beautiful garden even when you live in a home which has no outdoor yard or garden space too. Many people who live in an apartment in the city for instance, create container gardens on their balcony or patio area, and some even create them using window boxes which are attached to the outside of the building just under their windows.

Container gardens are fun to create for indoor areas too, using a wide variety of plants and flowers that will spruce up your home. In fact, almost any plant or flower can be grown in a container. Plants which grow quite large will need larger containers of course though, and if you start bushes, shrubs or trees in a container you'll eventually need to transplant them outside in the ground unless they are miniature varieties.

Some of the most popular types of container gardens include: Herb gardens in the kitchen or morning room; Annual or perennial gardens on the patio or inside the home; Vegetable gardens on the patio, balcony or deck; And even specialty gardens such as container salad gardens.

Most people have their first experience with container gardens when they buy a beautiful, lush arrangement of flowers or greenery at the store. These containers are usually filled to the brim with new flower blooms, or trailing vines that cascade over the side of the container.

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves with dead plants just a few weeks after having bought the beautiful arrangement, and they're at a loss as to why the plants didn't live. The answer is simple though. When you buy a ready made container garden at the store which is packed full of blooms and greenery, the container is usually too full for the plants to have the room they need to grow, live, and thrive.

To keep container garden plants alive for long periods of time, you must make sure they have enough room for their roots. Some plants have much larger or longer root balls than others too, so those plants will require larger containers in order to continue growing successfully.

If you really like the way a ready made container garden looks, you can take steps to keep it alive and beautiful in your home. When you buy the garden, simply buy a new, larger container to transfer the garden to. When you get home, just remove the plants from their original container and place them into the new one with additional soil. You may have to separate the plants a bit if they're all tangled together, but generally you can keep the arrangement looking very similar to the way it was when you bought it.

The larger container will give the plants more room for their roots to spread and grow, so your new garden will continue looking lovely for a very long time. As the plants continue growing though of course, you may need to ocassionally transfer them to another, even larger pot. Alternatively you can separate out some of the plants into smaller containers, and you'll have multiple container gardens instead of just one.