As someone who lives in an urban area, I’m always thinking about maximising my garden space.
Growing in containers is a fabulous way to increase your growing space to include concrete patios, balconies, fences, walls and windowsills. Containers are especially great if you live in an apartment or don’t have a garden, and they are easy to shift around to chase the sun or to bring to your next place when you move.
While growing in containers offers lots of flexibility, container plants do require extra love. They have no access to soil in the ground, so they depend on you to give them what they need.
Water
Container-grown plants need to be watered more often than in-ground or garden-bed plants. This is because containers hold less soil (hence less water) and dry out more quickly on hot days.
When watering, make sure that you water the entire volume of soil until the liquid starts draining from the bottom. During very hot periods, small pots may need to be watered two or three times a day, especially if you live in a dry climate or it’s windy.
An easy way to ensure that container-grown plants get enough water on hot days is to use self-watering pots. You can also place saucers underneath your pots and fill them with water to provide your plants with extra liquid to soak up.
Food
Container-grown plants only have access to whatever’s in the potting mix, and they can’t send out roots to forage for nutrients beyond that. So they depend on us to supply the nutrients they need. I prefer to use a combination of slow-release fertiliser and liquid fertiliser.
Apply an organic slow-release fertiliser (such as compost, well-aged animal manure or chicken manure pellets) to the potting mix at the start of the growing season. This ensures that the plants always have a basic level of food available to them.
Give a dose of liquid fertiliser when watering every now and then. This provides the plants with an extra boost of instantly available nutrients.
Container size
Larger pots are easier to look after than smaller ones. They dry out more slowly, and they allow plants more access to nutrients and more room to grow a strong root system. When you think about it, large containers are pretty much the same as small garden beds! A good way to manage your container growing is to cultivate a few small plants together in one large pot.
For example, plant five spring onions (scallions) in a large container, rather than each plant on its own in a small pot. You can also group together different plants with the same needs, such as Thai basil and shiso.
What to plant
Many Asian veggies, herbs and fruits lend themselves to container growing. Even if I had the in-ground space to plant them, I’d still grow them in pots. These include:
– plants that need to be dug up to harvest (such as ginger, turmeric and galangal) – simply empty the pot to gather the rhizomes
– frost-sensitive perennials (such as eggplant/aubergine and lemongrass) – you can easily move potted plants to a sheltered spot in winter
– invasive and weedy plants (such as jujube and goji berry) – they send out root suckers around the garden, so growing in a pot helps to contain the roots
– super-producing plants (such as curry leaf tree and yuzu) – these trees can grow large and produce more than you need when in the ground but will happily live in pots; this constrains their harvest to a more manageable amount for one household
– plants that happily live in pots (such as chilli and cumquat) – by growing them in pots you save your precious in-ground space for something else.
This is an edited extract from Your Asian Veggie Patch by Connie Cao, available now at all good book stores and online here.
