So, let’s talk deck flower gardens. Specifically, we want to dive into intensive flower gardening in containers and what it takes to do it right.
One of the things we practice is intensive flower gardening in relatively small containers. We love the look this gives our home, especially when the flowers are in full bloom. It’s one of our signature “flex” moves that screams to any passer-by that, “Yeah, we can grow stuff.” But, we’ll tell you, it’s not necessarily easy growing!
The biggest problem with growing anything in containers, especially small containers, is water access. In a container, your soil is limited and thus your plant’s access to water is limited. Intensive container gardening very quickly exhausts any water supply available to your many flowers growing in a container. The more plants, the more quickly the water supply is used up!
The main thing we’ve done to make this practical is to install an irrigation system on our deck. This waters the overwhelming majority of our deck flower gardens with a simple flick of a valve. We have irrigation line traversing our deck with exit points for any emitters we desire. For emitters, we mostly use a drip line with emitters every six inches, installed into a loop at each deck container. This ensures we get broad applications of water into our wide deck planters. We also have a handful of more typical drip emitters that we use for smaller containers and hanging baskets.
It’s important not to underestimate the relationship between “difficulty with watering” and the “frequency at which you’ll water.” If your gardens are difficult to water, it will simply happen less frequently. With intensive flower growing in containers, you only have one option. And that’s to water fairly frequently. So, that’s why we had to solve the “watering complexity” problem.
Another key thing we do is regularly apply water soluble fertilizers to our flower container gardens. We use a “bloom focused” fertilizer (typically high potassium/phosphorus) on very regular intervals to promote great flowers. Our goal isn’t necessarily to have “big” plants. Rather, in small containers with many plants, your soil’s nutrition can be exhausted quite quickly. So, replenishing those nutrients is key to stellar container based flower gardens.
One last area of focus lies in our soil. We make it a point to focus on the “water retention” properties of our soil, while at the same time also focusing on “well draining” properties. We do this through additives like vermiculite, peat moss and greensand. All of these promote great water holding capacity without negatively impacting drainage.
Intensive gardening in containers is what we’d consider “advanced” gardening. We know there’s a zillion bad examples out there and it “seems” like it should be easy. And of course, everything looks great in the early season! But, as the season rolls on, your methods and preparations will find themselves constantly tested. Mid summer is when the “rubber meets the road,” if you will. You will find out how difficult intensive container gardening “actually” is!
If you want an easier time at flower container gardening, like with hanging baskets and deck planters, it’s wise to simply plant less numbers of plants. Less plants means each one gets access to more soil, which reduces pressures on nutrition, watering and root space availability! While “more flowers” certainly looks cool, nothing looks cool when its dead!
Hopefully this gives you a fair bit of insight into our methods and practices when it comes to raising a large, container focused flower garden. We’re excited to share this garden with you in our upcoming “Flower Friday” series, where we highlight a lot of cool things about flowers!
