Thursday, February 9, 2012

Garden Planters - Growing Vegetable in a Planter

By Cameron Randall


Nothing is more enjoyable than vegetables picked out fresh from your own garden or perhaps your own garden planters. There's a certain pleasure to serving and consuming food that you yourself have cultivated and harvested. These days you don't need a plot of land to grow fresh vegetables. Many vegetables lend themselves well to planters gardening. With some thought to selecting bush or dwarf varieties nearly every vegetable can be adapted to growing in the pot. Vegetables that use up little space like carrots, radishes and lettuce, or crops that bear fruits over a long period of time like tomatoes and peppers are ideal for garden planters or containers. Everyone then may feel the numerous joys of the kitchen garden.

Selecting planters for the vegetable gardens could be just about anything: buckets, pails, flower pots, wooden boxes, window planters, or any number of other things. Make sure that the planter has drainage. No matter what kind of planters you choose for your vegetable garden it should have holes at the base or in the bottom to permit drainage of excess.

But of course your plants don't thrive and produce vegetable container gardening can be really so expensive and frustrating. Here are the tips applicable for most vegetables that will help you and your plants to have a good start. In preparing the soil for your vegetable make sure that you put extra effort in preparing your beds prior to planting because it will save you a lot of time and effort in the future. It's very important to water your plants. With regards to watering vegetables need extra care. Regular watering will certainly produce successful results. When you have a large garden you might want to consider a soaker hose. This will keep the plants have an even watering without getting the leaves wet and all you need to do is be sure you switch on the hose.

Most vegetables need full sun meaning a minimum of six hours of direct sunlight a day. You can easily overestimate how much sun an area really gets so either take out your watch and time how long the sun hits the spot where you want to put your vegetable container garden or make use of a sun calculator to have an exact not optimistic assessment. If you are living in a really hot zone you may have to shade your plants in the middle of the day so as not to fry them. Also it is best not to use metal containers or dark colored plastics or ceramics because they can heat up and cook your plant's roots.

Choosing garden planters may be daunting. You can use almost anything for a garden planter as long as it is big enough and has good drainage. Bear in mind though that the larger your container the easier it will be to maintain. The more soil a container can take the greater moisture it will retain. Do not bother with containers that are smaller than 12 inches and you will be a lot happier if they're no less than 18".




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