Get your garden started | part 7: pots
No garden beds? No worries!
This garden guide is the seventh in an 8-part series I will be releasing over the next month. It covers the essentials of starting a successful garden. The 8 guides will be available to all paying subscribers and members of the Wild Garden club, and there will be some previews and sneak peeks for free subscribers. Want to access all my garden guides, tours and recipes? Click the button below to upgrade your membership.
Hello and welcome back to the How to get your garden started series that I will be sharing with you over the next four weeks. This is a simple, pared-back series that covers the topics that I think are essential when starting a garden. Think of it as a bit of a primer - a guide to the fundamental starting points to get you motivated and started in your garden this autumn.
If you’re just joining us, you can catch up on parts one, two, three, four, five and six here:
If you want to access the full 8 parts in this series, you can upgrade your subscription to paid by clicking the button below :)
Now, onto part seven - growing in pots.
Get your garden started | part seven
No garden beds? No worries!
If you’re in a rental, or if your garden is a courtyard or a balcony, that’s no reason to put off growing beautiful and delicious plants. Pots are your answer! What’s more, even if you do have plenty of garden beds, there are some instances where gardening in pots is actually preferable to gardening in the soil (like if your garden beds are filled with tree roots and digging in them is impossible).
The main benefit of growing in pots (apart from their portability) is that you have total control over the plant and the environment that it grows in. You can choose the soil, you can control the amount of water it gets, and if it’s a plant that tends to be a bit invasive you can easily prevent it from taking over your garden.
And happily, it’s actually very easy to grow healthy plants in pots. Like any plant, you really just need to make sure they’re getting enough sunlight, water and nutrients to thrive. There are, of course, a few extra challenges when growing in pots that are worth keeping in mind.
Challenges of growing in pots
Maintaining good soil
For one thing, although it can be useful to be able to control the soil, water and growing conditions of whatever you’re growing, this also means you are responsible for maintaining the soil, water and growing conditions that each plant receives. When you grow plants in garden beds, they have a little bit of autonomy - they can spread their roots out wide in search of extra water and nutrients. When you grow plants in pots, everything they need to thrive must be provided within the pot itself - that’s all they’ll ever have. So ensuring you have tip-top soil and plenty of water is a must.
When selecting soil for your potted plants, a good quality potting mix tends to work best. Avoid using soil directly from your garden - it’s unlikely that it will have the right structure or nutritional value to keep your plants happy. Garden soil also tends to be heavier than potting mix, which is specially formulated to be light and free draining. Avoid the temptation to fill your pot with a heap of other soil products - a heavy compost or heaps of animal manure will tend to absorb more moisture and drain less easily, which can lead to a heavy pot filled with compacted soil (I’ll sometimes add a little animal manure on top of my potting mix for plants that are heavy feeders, but I generally aim to fill my pots primarily with fresh potting mix). I also steer clear of adding clay. Although I use a lot of clay in our garden beds to combat the sandy soil, it’s not useful in pots as it makes the soil too dense and heavy. In all my time, I’ve found that a premium potting mix is the best thing to use in my potted garden (just make sure to go for the really primo ones as the tend to work a lot better than the cheaper varieties).
Providing drainage
Another challenge pots can present is the issue of drainage. Most plants don’t appreciate having their roots sitting in soggy soil - it tends to lead to root rot and a sick or dying plant. Some people go to all kinds of lengths to improve drainage in their pots, filling them with cracked pieces of terracotta or large stones at the bottom in efforts to increase their drainage capacity. I don’t find any of this is necessary and the end result is usually a frustrating mixture of potting mix infested with broken bits of tile and stone - very annoying to try to reuse or dispose of! Instead, make sure to buy pots with enough holes at the base, use a good quality potting mix that is designed to allow free drainage of water, and pop your pot up on some feet, so that there is a gap between the pot and the ground where the water can drain out - easy!
Providing enough growing space
Potted plants have a finite amount of growing space. This is why it’s important to make sure that you provide them with plenty of nutrients and water to keep them happy. It also means you need to take into account the size of each plant you’re sticking in a pot. Even if you give a plant great soil and plenty of water, if the pot it’s in is too small you’ll be fighting an uphill battle to get it to thrive. Many gardeners have a tendency to underestimate the size of the pots they need for different plants. When you pop plants in as seedlings, they look so tiny it’s hard to imagine that one day they’ll spread to take over an entire half-wine barrel. But a lot of veggies you’ll want to grow in a potted garden need a generous amount of growing space to really thrive. Without enough space, these plants will end up root bound and stressed, they will become targets for bugs and diseases, and your yield will be much smaller. It can take a little while to get your eye in, to know what sized pots are best suited to your different plants, but a good general rule of thumb when you’re starting out is to go bigger than you think. You can also get a rough idea of the ideal pot size for your plants off Google (or, better still, off your Seed to Supper gardening guides!). And, at the end of each season, when you take your finished veggies out of their pots to replenish the soil and grow something new, pay attention to the root systems of the plants you remove. Have the entirely filled the pot? If so, you might want to upgrade to a bigger pot for that plant next year.
Keeping your pots cool and moist
The hardest time to grow a potted garden is summer. Pots tend to dry out a lot faster in warm weather, especially those pots that are made of breathable materials like terracotta or fabric grow bags. With very breathable pots, the soil closest to the outside of the pot will rapidly sizzle and lose moisture on hot days. And without adequate watering most pots will wind up bone dry. Once the soil in a pot has totally dried out it becomes a lot harder to bring it back to good health, so it’s better to avoid getting parched soil in the first place, if you can help it.
Some pots are easier to keep moist than others. Bigger pots are easier than smaller pots (they contain a greater mass of soil and so will hold onto moisture longer than little pots), plastic pots and pots with glazes are less permeable to water and so will retain moisture more easily than terracotta or fabric pots. You can also add mulch on top of the soil in your pots to help lock more moisture into the soil. Above all, it’s important to keep your pots consistently watered and avoid letting them dry out in the first place. If your pots DO dry out (and if they’re not too big to lift) a good hack for replenishing their moisture is to get a big bucket of water and add a little Seasol to it, then fully submerge the entire pot in the water. Hold it underwater until bubbles stop rising up out of the soil. This ensures that the soil is totally soaked and can help bring bone-dry soil back to life.
Replenishing spent soil
All soil needs frequent replenishment because the plants we go extract nutrients from it in order thrive, produce flowers or bear fruit. In garden beds, soil replenishment often takes the form of adding generous layers of manure and mulch every season. In pots, things are a little different.
First up, know that there is very little to be gained by planting new plants in old potting mix that you’ve already been growing in. When a pot has already had plants in it for a whole season, the soil it contains will have been stripped of nutrients and will likely not be very moisture retentive or useful to a new batch of plants. And while you can sometimes get away with neglecting the soil in your garden beds for a couple of successive sowings (although I don’t recommend it), you really, really can’t with potted plants.
So, how do you boost up your old potting mix? The first thing to do is avoid letting the soil in your pots totally degrade in the first place. So consistently topping the pot up with mulch and adding a handful of manure as your first season of plants grow will help keep the soil in better condition before the next season rolls around.
Once it comes to replanting your pots, I find it best to tip the potting mix out into a big bucket. Give it a squirt with the hose to see if it’s absorbing much moisture. If it’s not - if it’s totally barren and dry - your best bet is to add the whole thing to your compost tumbler (where it can slowly turn back into nice crumbly compost-y soil) or to use it as topsoil for your lawn. If it’s not too bad, you might be able to get away with mixing through some good quality animal manure to help boost its moisture-absorbing abilities and increase its nutrient content. I add a blended cow/sheep/chicken manure to my spent potting mix, at a ratio of about 1:3 manure:potting mix. Adding this much manure isn’t necessary when you’re starting with fresh potting mix, but once the potting mix has been used for a whole season it can help you bring it back to life for an extra season.
The best plants for a potted veggie patch
There are soooo many great edible plants you can grow in a potted garden. And in fact, some veggies perform much better in pots than in garden beds. Here are the plants I will intentionally grow in pots, even when there are spaces available in my garden beds:
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