It’s been said of Ginger Rogers — the dancer best known for her partnership with Fred Astaire — that she did everything the man did, only backwards and in high heels. As a container gardener, you will be following the same basic principles of ordinary, in-the-ground gardening, but you may face a few extra challenges along the way. This is largely because the plants are strictly confined and depend on you to be ready to notice problems and to intervene. With practice your show can be as spectacular and effortless-looking as Ginger’s performances.
When approached and undertaken thoughtfully, gardening in containers will make the environment around your home more hospitable for both people and wildlife. It gives you a chance to express yourself, reinvent your style and to experiment with new plants, colours and combinations. There are plenty of other reasons to garden in pots rather than in the ground.
Plants in pots depend entirely on you — on the growing medium you choose and the inputs you give them — so you must pay a little more attention to watering, nutrients and the positioning of pots. In the ground, a plant that needs water can, to a certain extent, send its roots questing through the soil; while in moist ground a plant that hates to be waterlogged may survive because the plants around it are using up excess moisture and keeping the soil structure open. Both of these scenarios are much less likely in pots. The limiting factor for most potted plants comes down to water supply. Even if you live on the rainy side of Rainsville, you cannot rely on rainfall, especially when the plants have matured enough for their foliage to cover the surface of the pot (their leaves will act like an umbrella and hardly any moisture will
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