If you’ve never tried it, gardening with containers is fun, easy, and anyone can do it. With a terracotta pot, some summer bedding, and green-fingered expertise, your miniature garden comes to life. As each plant grows, it brings a high level of beauty your friends will envy.
When you’re unsure where to set the containers, you have numerous spots around your home, for instance, near your front entrance or driveway. Around the pool, the back porch, inside your home, or out on your balcony.
Before Using Inspect Your Containers
Before you begin using your containers, we recommend inspecting and washing them thoroughly, inside and out. That is vital if you’re using a pot that previously had plants in it. Quite often, there are traces of old compost found on the pot’s walls.
Attached to the composting material, you will discover pests, diseases, and mold spores, that gets overlooked. Those intruders can harm or infect your new plants. We recommend putting your planter in water that contains a garden disinfectant and scrub it until clean.
During your inspection, do check for adequate drainage holes. Your plant’s roots need oxygen; should water fill the container and not drain quickly, those roots will starve. A simple trick is to place a layer of broken terracotta over the drainage holes to prevent compost blockage.
How To Prepare Your Containers
With your containers thoroughly washed, scrubbed, disinfected, and rinsed, now it’s time to prepare them for plants. Here you will have four simple steps:
- Compost Level
- Plant Emersion
- Center Planting
- Watering
Step 1. Fill your container with quality peat or loam-based compost and firm lightly. Check that the compost stops at least 1 inch below the lip of the container; this will be your watering space.
Step 2. Hours before planting, plunge our plants into a bucket of water and thoroughly soak them. That type of watering prevents shock once replanted in new compost.
Step 3. Create a central hole large enough for the rootball. Place the plant into the hole firming the compost around it.
Step 4. With the 1 inch space below the lip of the container, level the surface of the compost. Water thoroughly until water starts to flow from the base of the pot.
That’s all it takes to get you started gardening with containers!
Need Our Help Gardening With Containers?
Do you have a gardening container idea but don’t know where to start? Our lawn care & landscape professionals at “A Clean Cut Lawn Care” can help you bring your vision to life. If you’re a homeowner or property manager in Fayetteville, Farmington, Prairie Grove, Cave Springs, Elm Springs, Springdale, and SW Rogers, we can quickly assist you.
Are you ready to discover the possibilities of gardening with containers at your Northwest Arkansas property or landscape? If so, call us at 479-262-0253 or Contact us here.
