Some Great Container Gardening Ideas

Container vegetable gardening is a great way to extend your growing season into the long, cold winter months. You need to be a little smarter about it and think more about smart ways to put everything together, but the result will be much better than you may expect if you’ve never done this. All you need are a few container gardening ideas to get started and you can start editing them to suit your specific needs

One of my favorites is to use old canvas “over the door” shoe hangers for growing herbs and spices. Not only can they be put just about anywhere, but they drain exceptionally well. The major downfall of this type of container garden is that they can fall to pieces if you don’t do them right. For the most part, using quality canvas will give you two years out of the container at least. However, most of the shoe organizers sold in stores today are made out of a less sturdy material and they will start falling apart in a matter of months. Also, the ones commonly sold in stores today are treated with chemicals that you don’t exactly want leaching into your food. The old canvas ones are great, though.

Another method of container gardening vegetables is to build your own garden box. This can be easily done with an old milk crate that you lay hardware cloth into. You can also use gardening cloth for this, or really anything else that will help keep the dirt from falling back out of the milk crate. When it comes to milk crates, you can find them very cheap at lots of different stores (maybe 2 bucks?) and you can generally find them for free online too if you know where to look.

One of the most important things to remember when you’re doing all of this is that you’ll have to have some kind of lighting setup if you are using these containers indoors. LED lights are a great solution for this since they don’t cost much to buy, they use very little electricity, and plants really like them. You just need to make sure you get bulbs that are at least 1 watt in strength or you won’t get very good results.