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This week’s guest post comes from famed Billy Goodnick.  Billy Goodnick is a landscape architect, educator, garden writer, TV personality and rock and roll drummer living in the enviable Left Coast paradise of Santa Barbara. His philosophy embraces the idea the every garden should be beautiful, functional and sustainable.

My very first container garden was a water-filled Hellman’s mayonaisse jar topped with a yam impaled on toothpicks. Within a few weeks, a veritable jungle was seeking the sun and enveloping on the kitchen curtains. Nothing succeeds like success.

For some, a container garden might be no more than an out-of-control spud, or a dwarf peach tree and a cloud of sweet alyssum spilling from a half-barrel. For those with more ambition, a container garden starts with a bold burst of exotic plants in flambouyantly glazed pots. Regardless of where you are on the container garden continuum, there are a few concepts and techniques that apply across the board.

Why Containers?

You don’t have to be an apartment dweller with a postage-stamp balcony to appreciate the value of container gardening.

• Flexibility: Container gardens allow you to provide exactly the right kind of soil in each pot, letting you to mix and match plants that you’d never consider putting together in the ground.
• Practicality: Growing plants in pots can satisfy functional as well as aesthetic needs. Use potted plants as a privacy hedge, raise orchids to animate your favorite vase, or start an uban farm with fruit trees, vegetables and herbs. (With any luck, your eggplant will lay a few eggs.)
• Portability: Pots can be moved around for optimal sunlight, or to protect sensitive plants  from the elements. If you live in a harsh winter climate, you can easily move tender plants to a warmer location, then let them out to play in the spring sunshine.
• Splashy: Container gardens make eye-catching focal points, especially when there’s a well-conceived interplay between the features of the plant and the color, texture and form of the vessel. Debra Lee Baldwin’s book, Succulent Container Gardens (Timber Press), serves up dazzling images and a host of design ideas, as well as a clear explanation of design principles that apply to every type of plant and pot combination.

Container Basics

Here are a few basic considerations for container plants:

• With the exception of water-loving bog gardens, a drainage hole at the bottom of the pot is a must. Plants need air in the soil and without a drain hole the planting medium will turn anaerobic, eventually killing the plant. Loosely cover the hole with a rock, broken piece of pottery or wire mesh to keep soil from washing out.
• Right plant / right soil is the rule. Ask a trained professional about the best soil mix for the plants you’ve chosen. You’ll want to know whether the plants prefer a rich, moisture-holding root medium high in leaf mold and sphagnum moss, or in the case of succulents and many Mediterranean varieties, a well-aerated potting mix with lots of sand, pumice or perlite. Do not use soil from your garden, which tends to be too heavy and becomes compacted over time.
• Size matters. Research the mature size of each plant to estimate how big your container should be—plants with lots of biomass above ground produce hefty root systems for water and nutrient uptake.

Simple Math

Thriller + Filler + Spiller = Killer Container Combo. A thriller is an animated, spiky plant that excites the eye with strong vertical lines – think grasses like Miscanthus, heavenly bamboo (Nandina species) or tropically luscious Canna lily. The filler is a mounding plant with interesting foliage or flowers that softens the effect of the thriller, like lavender, felicia daisy or chartreuse-colored Euphorbia characias. You’ve probably figured out spiller, but just in case, these are plants that pour over the rim of the pot, and include ground covers like  succulent-leafed stonecrop, silver dichondra and periwinkle.

Container gardens are usually short-lived. Roots will eventually congest the pot and deplete the nutrients in the soil. Though many plants can be root-pruned and put back in the same container with fresh soil, some gardeners see the inevitable waning of each container garden as an opportunity to dream up new ideas, visit their local nursery and start afresh.

I can just hear you: “Darn, another Saturday morning strolling through my favorite garden center.”

How ever will you cope?

See Billy Goodnick’s design gallery at his website and visit his Cool Green Gardens blog at Fine Gardening.com. His Taking Out the Grass rock ‘n roll music video is at YouTube.com and Garden Wise Guys TV show at SBWater.org.

Tags: container gardening, Guest Posts, Planters

Today’s guest post is for all those passionate (or aspiring) urban gardeners (and, well, of course… all those interested in urban gardening)!  LaManda Joy, a Chicago vegetable gardener and avid blogger, brings us her tale of creating a fruitful vegetable garden right in Chicago! Her blog, theyarden.com, chronicles the joys and challenges of urban gardening and reflects the skills and passion of its veteran creator.

Follow LaManda Joy on Twitter @TheYarden and at Facebook.com/TheYarden.

In 2006, after seven very long and gardenless years, my husband woke up one February morning and said, “Let’s go look at houses!” What he really meant was “Let’s go look at yards!”

Finding a sunny yard that isn’t shaded with 100-year-old trees or an apartment complex looking down on it is a bit of a trick in Chicago. We thought we’d seen all the neighborhoods – and were sadly disappointed – when we stumbled upon a secret nook in Chicago’s 40^th Ward.

Long story short… we ended up “buying a yard with a house attached to it” with the sole, myopic purpose of putting in an amazing vegetable garden where we could grow heirloom vegetables, entertain and develop a community of neighbors and friends.

We wanted to install a privacy fence and a deck area over the concrete slab in the back as well as a “boardwalk” to cover an existing, but unsightly, concrete path from the front gate to the concrete slab. We also knew we wanted some “climbing area” for wisteria and sweet autumn clematis…

As you will see here we solved the “climbing area” issue with a pergola. The wisteria is barely visible behind the red chair – it is much more robust three seasons later…

This also created a nice sitting area that is the bridge from the “deck” to the garden… you will notice we bought some very inexpensive burlap and wove it between the slats of the pergola to create a shade canopy (you can see the overlap hanging down on the left side). This worked out to be a great solution to this sunny spot and a favorite sitting area for my husband. As you can see, I prefer the hammock

We liked the pergola so much we ended up putting a matching one by the front garden gate.

This pergola, too, has ended up being a lot of fun! We use the supports to train beans or vines. One year we grew Chinese yardlong beans up and over the pergola so you had to walk through them like the long rags in a carwash. We called it the “snack and slap” and laughed a lot whenever we had to walk the beany gauntlet.

Along with the raised beds, which you see partially in the photo above, we also put in a trellis for more vertical growing space and to block the view of a work area with a very large telephone pole (ah the joys of urban living!)

All of the construction was done with untreated cedar. It smelled great and sometimes still does on a very warm day. However, knowing then what I know now, I would have chosen a recycled wood-like material to avoid having to stain. But, ces’t la vie… perhaps that’s a solution for The Yarden 2.0 – if we can ever find a yard like this again in Chicago!

ABOUT LaMANDA JOY

Awarded honorable mention in Mayor Daley’s Landscape Competition for 2009, LaManda Joy’s 1,700 square foot, heirloom organic garden in Chicago’s 40^th Ward is a laboratory and teaching ground for friends and neighbors. LaManda speaks and writes about diverse aspects of a self-sufficient life in the city, Chicago WW2 Victory Gardens, canning and other related topics.

Tags: cedar, container gardening, pergola, urban gardening

This time of the year is often called the dead of winter.  At a glance, that can seem an appropriate description, whether everything’s covered with snow and ice, or there’s just a brown landscape with barren trees, shrubs, and plants that look, well, dead.

Of course, we know that’s not the case.  Some things are in a state of dormancy, while others are just as active as always.  For example, those tracks in the fresh snow prove that the animals are out in full force, foraging for food; and if you throw some scraps out, or hang a birdfeeder or two, you’ll see plenty of life in your backyard.

You can go out and put down some tracks, too, because there’s plenty to do in the garden in January.  Even when it’s blanketed with snow, the soil is still active, and certain plants and trees, such as evergreens, continue to take nutrients from it.  Because they’re crucial to the overall health of your garden, it’s important to replenish them for your spring growing season.  Composting is one of the best ways to do this, and you should keep tending and turning your compost pile, as well as adding organic materials to it, throughout the winter.

Mulching is another thing that you can do now to keep your plants thriving.  Applying a layer of shredded bark or wood chips, three to four inches thick, will give the soil, your plants, and their roots, extra protection from the elements, especially if an early warm spell tricks them into thinking that it’s time to make their spring debut.

If you’re just not in the mood to go outside right now, or it’s dangerously cold, you can do some indoor container gardening.  Go to a nursery and find the plants that will best fit your needs, your available space, and your level of expertise.

Then, visit CedarStore.com and choose from our great selection of red cedar, white cedar, and pine planters, planter boxes, planter tubs, window boxes, polywood planters and planter trellises, and metal planters, which are available in over a dozen bright colors.

This way, you’ll be doing something positive – bringing the dead of winter back to life!

Yours Outdoors,

Kathy

Tags: birdfeeders, container gardening, metal planters, planter boxes, planter trellises, planter tubs, Planters, polywood planters, red cedar, white cedar, window boxes, winter gardening