Container Gardening Tips For Outside Container Gardens

Container Gardening Tips

Get great container gardening ideas and tips. Container gardening has become a favorite form of growing beautiful flowers and home-grown edibles. It is a blessing to gardeners who have limited land for cultivation.

You can move plants from place to place and enjoy them at close range, make the most of restricted space, plus there is the benefit of less weeding.

Proper feeding and maintenance are the secrets to keeping your pots of plants healthy and fruitful all season. Plants in containers require more than just daily watering; they need fertilizer and pruning, too.

With regular, simple care you'll be rewarded with bountiful pots, barrels and urns brimming with blooms from season to season. Here's how...

The Key To Container Gardening
Is Nutrition

Keep a steady supply of nutrients and water to your plants. Pots, vases, and barrels full of healthy plants need more nutrients than the container itself can provide, so it's up to you to feed them sufficiently.

Many container plants are heavy feeders. Give these plants a healthy soil mix full of organic matter and nutrients. Add a bit of compost to keep trace elements in the soil. Be sure to use a balanced fertilizer that is right for the plant. One limiting factor with flower and vegetable container gardening is that you do not have the large volumes of soil and humus to protect your plants from over-fertilizing.

For outside container gardening, fill the pots with a soil-based mixture using rich topsoil. A good soil mixture consists of one part topsoil, one part peat moss or compost, and one part vermiculite or perlite. For every 6 inches of mixture, add about a teaspoon of fertilizer and a tablespoon of limestone.

Keep a check on proper moisture, and water when the soil feels dry to the touch. In extremely hot weather, outside container gardens may require watering twice a day.

Add A Little Primping and Pruning

Snip away dead flowers and dying foliage about once a week. This improves the overall appearance, but more importantly it keeps the plants healthy and productive.

To remove old blooms, remove the flower stems back to a leaf node or main stem. Remove any brown or tattered leaves and foliage back to the main stem as well.

About 2 to 3 times a season, container plants typically need to be pruned for a good shaping up. Some flowers for container gardens grow faster than others, so keep the more vigorous plants pruned for a good balance with pots that support a mixed arrangement.

Pruning the tips of a few stems will also encourage under-achieving plants to grow fuller.

Need Ideas For Your Garden?

Discover what's best to plant in your space-saving garden, and what pots and vessels to use. We've got some great container gardening ideas here.

On a more specific level, there are certain forms of gardening in containers which have become more specialized, such as growing exotic orchids or raising fresh, delicious container vegetables!

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