My container garden is doing pretty well right now, everything seems to be growing without any problems. The bean seeds that I replanted a few days ago haven't come up yet, but I don't expect to see them come up for at least a few more days. We haven't gotten any rain for about a week now so I've had to water the plants pretty much every day. Containers tend to dry out faster than the ground, so you have to keep up with the watering when it doesn't rain.
Right now in my container garden, I have 4 big pots that are planted with beans, a tote that has 2 seed potatoes in it, a big pot with a cherry tomato plant in it, a medium size pot with mint in it, and 3 medium small pots with everbearing strawberry plants in them. I also have a medium size pot with June bearing strawberry plants in it that is sitting in the middle of the strawberry patch in front of the container garden.
The strawberry patch is getting full with green strawberries now. The patch is all June bearing plants, they bear their fruits over a short period and then they're done for the year.
The everbearing strawberry plants in the pots are supposed to bear fruit off an on all summer. This is my first year growing them, so I don't know how often they flower. One of the plants is on it's second flowering now. I've gotten a few berries from these plants already. These plants were in the greenhouse until a week or so ago.
The cherry tomato plant looks a bit weird with it's small leaves, but it seems to be growing well enough, and it has little tomatoes on it, so it must be doing OK. The mint plants are right next to the tomato plant.
The green bean plants seem to be doing well, I didn't lose any of the plants that I moved from the middle pots to fill the gaps from seeds not germinating.
The raised bed behind the container garden is growing the yellow wax bean plants. I decided to put the irrigation pipe in place on the raised bed to make it easier to water these plants all at once. I hook the hose from the irrigation pipe to the rain barrels and gravity feed the water to the plants. I covered the dirt with some straw to help retain the moisture a bit better, and maybe slow down some of the weed growth.
I originally set up my container garden to see if it was possible to actually grow a reasonable amount of food in containers, and I have become convinced that if I couldn't have a garden in the yard, I could grow a lot of food in containers. Half of my tomato plants are in large pots in the greenhouse, so they could be considered as part of the container garden. I think that the plant that would be the biggest challenge to grow in containers would be corn, it takes up a lot of space. I think you could grow a small patch of sweet corn in containers without too much trouble, but if you wanted a lot of corn, you would need a lot of big containers. Growing potatoes in big containers seems to be pretty popular now because they're easier to harvest from containers, and you can get good yields of potatoes. I have found that I prefer to grow bush type green beans in containers, they're easier to pick that way, and they grow just as well as they do in a regular garden. Also, container gardening is ideal for growing food in areas with poor soil quality, you don't have to bring in as much good dirt for containers as you would to fill raised beds. And, of course, a container garden is really good for a temporary garden if you don't plan on staying where you're living, but you still want to grow some plants.
Well, that's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
