For our last entry in our “growing without a garden” series, it’s one of our hands down favorite topics around here and that’s container gardening!
Container gardening sometimes gets a bad rap, but it’s completely undeserved. You can successfully grow practically all types of vegetables in containers successfully. Beyond just that, container gardening is extremely helpful in northern and colder climates as it promotes warmer soils and can improve your results compared to more traditional in-ground gardens.
We will tell you that container gardening is challenging, it’s decidedly not gardening on “easy mode.” There’s a lot of unique problems associated with it, but they are all surmountable and will allow the gardener to succeed. That said, from lettuce to large plants like tomatoes, we haven’t found a single plant that we can’t grow in containers!
What’s great about container gardens is you can do them practically anywhere. You don’t need a dedicated space or special growing area at all, even a slab of concrete is perfect! Heck, we grow on our deck, which has the added benefit of being extremely moose resistant! You can scale a container garden quite high, practically to the point where it can be comparable to more traditional gardens. For example, we have probably somewhere over 130 different containers we grow in every year! Just keep in mind that scale increases the challenge around it.
Whether you’re in an apartment, renting or you’re reluctant to put in a garden, containers are an excellent way to get involved in growing. They can allow you to test the waters quite easily and see if it works for you, without having to invest a lot into it. They’re also great for older folks or people with mobility issues as they are easy to take care of and don’t require nearly as much physical effort as traditional growing.
If you’re interested in container growing, you’ve found a good resource with us. We still practice container gardening to this day and find it vital to our efforts. Thus, you’ll see that we talk a lot about it and show you ways that you can scale the technique even into serious food production.
