Given the growing (haha) popularity of vegetable gardening over the last several years, which has gone into overdrive during the pandemic, more and more people are looking for innovative ways to grow in all kinds of spaces. Container vegetable gardening can be as simple as popping a tomato into a bucket, but there are lots of different ways to successfully grow crops in small, mobile containers. It is possible to grow full sized crops in containers, given a large enough container and space to grow. But more and more plant breeders have been developing small and dwarf cultivars of lots of different kinds of crop plants to meet the burgeoning interest in container and small space gardening. Let’s talk a bit about growing in containers, about some of those crops that do well in containers (including some dwarf/small cultivars, and even some design to make those vegetable containers attractive on your patio or porch.
Container Culture
Growing vegetables and fruits in containers follows the same general rules that ornamentals and houseplants follow. We’ve covered several container questions here on the GP blog, which you can find here. Probably one of the biggest questions (and myths) that we encounter is the placement of rocks or other items in the bottom of pots for drainage. It is a common question over on our social media. So to just get that out of the way, don’t do it – it actually makes drainage worse. The only exception might be if you are using a really large, deep pot and need to fill it with something so you don’t have to fill it all the way with soil – but you still need to ensure that the soil is sufficiently deep so that you don’t end up with waterlogged soil in the root zone.
