Container Gardening

Managing small spaces for gardening always requires some ingenuity.  When you are growing vegetables, and looking to fit large harvests into a smaller footprint, it becomes important to plan carefully and design your container garden to maximize your available space.

One way to get more from a small area is to grow vertically, rather than horizontally, by using poles and trellises in your container garden.

Many vegetables are climbers by nature, and well suited to trellises or poles.  Peas and beans fall into this category.  You can buy bush varieties of peas or beans, but even the bush varieties will usually benefit from staking.  The best yielding pea and bean plants tend to be the vining varieties, which can grow to 8-foot vines laden with pretty leaves and plump pods.

Cucumbers and miniature pumpkins are other good vining plants that will appreciate a trellis.  These heavier plants will often need a sturdier trellis than peas or beans, to support the weight of the vines and the vegetables themselves.  You can also sometimes find vining varieties of other plants, such as eggplant and summer squashes.

You can use some real creativity with trellising, especially in a container garden.  If you wish to make effective use of a wall space, you can mount a simple inexpensive flat trellis on your wall and let beans or teas climb up it.  The vines will climb to decorate your wall like ivy, with little flowers and bright leaves, and the produce will be easy to access.

You can also buy freestanding trellises for placement around your patio.  Bear in mind that if you plan to place a trellis in a container, the container must be large enough and have sufficient weight in the base to resist tipping over.  Plan for a deep container, and be certain to place the trellis securely.

One of the more dramatic trellises for placement in a container are pyramid trellises, which can be placed in the center of a large container.  If you start with a container of 24 inches or more , you can plant a pyramid trellis in the center.  By training beans up the plant and growing lower-profile plants such as herbs or salad greens around the trellis, you can maximize space for produce and make a dramatic statement.

Note that trellises don’t need to be expensive.  You can buy simple unframed trellises at your local lumberyard for well under $20, and you can build your own pyramid trellis by building a teepee of gardening stakes and winding rings of twine or fishing line around them.  A little creativity and effort can turn raw materials into an attractive and functional trellis.

Don’t be afraid to try unusual things in your container garden!  An old ladder, leaned up against a wall, can make an attractive trellis.  If you are using a shelf for your pots, try letting yoru peas climb the shelf itself.  Old chairs, railings, or any piece of furniture can be used as a support for vining plants.  The only limit is your creativity!

When I went to my mother’s house yesterday, I found her (in-ground) tomatoes suffering from a fairly severe case of early blight.  In my part of the world (Massachusetts), this has been an extremely wet June, leading to some delays in vegetable growth and some fun and exciting health problems for our plants.  Inspired, I’ve decided to talk about early blight in container tomatoes.

As with most vegetable diseases, this is more common with in-ground plants than it is with vegetables grown in pots.  Most plant diseases incubate in the soil, and the soil for in-ground vegetable gardens is more likely to be contaminated than the soil in containers, especially if you use fresh potting mix every year for your container garden.

However, the fact that it’s more common with in-ground tomatoes doesn’t mean you don’t see it when growing containers in pots.  So, what is early blight?

Early blight is a fungal infection that can affect eggplant, pepper, potato, and tomato plants.  It tends to do the most damage to potato and tomato plants.  It survives between hosts in the soil, living off the plant matter in the dirt.

Early blight can affect the leaves, the stem, and the fruit of tomato plants.  The symptoms vary depending on what part of the plant you are looking at.

Leaf Lesions

The first place you usually spot early blight is on the oldest leaves, near the bottom of the plant.  It will show as brown blotchy spots, surrounded by a yellow halo.  Eventually, the yellow will overtake the entire leaf, and it will wither and die.

If the damage spreads to the stem, it will show as dark, elongated patches on the stem.  Fruit can also be affected, with dark sunken lesions on the fruit.  These are leathery to the touch, and usually occur at the stem end of the fruit.

If you catch early blight when it first appears, it is usually correctable.  Early blight spreads up the plant from the lowest affected leaves, so when you see leaves with the characteristic lesions, remove them immediately.  Damaged stems will eventually kill off any plant growing beyond them, so if you have main stem damage, it is best to pull the entire plant and start over.  Any affected fruits should be picked and thrown away, letting the plant focus its energy on healthy tomatoes.

You can use a mild fungicide to catch early cases of blight.  Organic gardeners find that a milk spray (one part milk to 10 parts water, misted on the plant after every rain), helps prevent fungal infections or treat existing ones.

Preventing blight is usually easier than fixing it, however.  The most common way for tomatoes to develop blight is from infected soil splashing up onto their lower leaves.  To prevent this, make sure to tie up all leaves that hang close to the ground.  You can trim the lower branches entirely as the plant grows: these won’t get as much sun and will not thrive anyway.

You can also mulch over your soil, creating a barrier between the dirt and the plant.  This has the added benefit of keeping the soil more moist between watering sessions, which is always a challenge for container gardeners.

The easiest way to start out with container vegetable gardening is to choose a pot for each plant, make sure the pot is a good fit, and grow each plant in its own isolated splendor.  You can control the environment for each container separately, choose fertilizers for each plant, and do the work of planting each at the right time and without having to work around other plants.

However, it makes for much more attractive, full-looking vegetable container gardens if you plant a few different vegetables in a single container, and plan them so that one plant is finishing its life cycle as the next plant is beginning to really take off.  This is called succession gardening.

There are three real types of plants when it comes to seasons: spring, summer, and fall vegetables.

Spring vegetables can be planted before the final frosts have stopped, and are cold-weather hardy as seedlings.  Generally, they will produce up until the weather starts to get really hot, and then your harvest will dry up.

Generally, these can be planted in your container garden in March or April, though in climates with mild winters, you can start in February.  Some good spring plants include salad greens like lettuce, arugula, or spinach, radishes, or pea plants.

Summer vegetables should be planted after all danger or frost has passed.  These will thrive in the heat and grow to overwhelm your containers.  Many of them will continue to produce well into the fall, but their peak time will be summer.  Most of these are easiest to start from seedlings.  Don’t clear the entire container to make room for them; just make a space in the middle.  As they grow, they will crowd out your spring plants, making their own room.

These should be planted generally in late May or early June, though you can plant them as soon as your spring crop begins to die off.  Some good summer vegetables include tomatoes, eggplant, summer squash, peppers, and cucumbers.

Fall vegetables come in two varieties for me.  One are the true fall plants, hardy into cold weather, such as kale, Swiss chard, or fennel.  These plants will survive past a few hard frosts and continue to produce.  The other are the spring plants which could not bear the heat of summer, planted for a second crop in the early fall.

With either type of plant, you want to seed around the end of July, or a little later for fast-growing plants.  If you planted something tall in May, like peppers or tomatoes, you should clear space for the fall planting by trimming off the lower leaves of your summer plant.  If you chose something bushy, like squash, you can clear space around the outside of your container by trimming off old leaves.  When you’re done with your summer plant entirely and the fall crop has started coming in, you can remove the summer plant by trimming it off at the soil line.

Note that you don’t need to limit yourself to just one spring or fall crop!  Alternating peas and lettuce in a large container can give you extra visual appeal and a nicely varied harvest.  Also remember that you need more room for a succession garden than you would for any crop individually.  You want a container at least 18 inches in diameter for most of the succession planting described here.