May 10 Column: Grow Vegetables in Containers

This week’s garden column is about growing vegetables in containers. Even if you don’t have an actual spot for a garden, or have no yard at all, you can still grow veggies. The solution? Plant them in pots! Here’s a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Expand your harvest options with container gardening. 

One thing I didn’t have room to include in my column was a rough guideline for choosing the size of container for specific types of vegetables, so here it is:

For large vegetables such as artichokes, potatoes, pumpkins, summer squash, tomatoes, choose 5- to 10-gallon pots.

For medium-sized vegetables such as broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers, eggplants, peppers, go with 5-gallon pots.

And for small-rooted veggies like lettuce, radishes, spinach, Swiss card, choose 1- to 2-gallon pots.

Also, here is a list of vegetables that do best when started from seeds sown directly into the pots: beans, carrots, kale, lettuce, peas, radishes and Swiss chard.

OK, I hope this information will help and also inspire you. And even if you DO have a conventional vegetable garden, why not expand it a bit by planting a few veggies in pots? They look cool and will give you an even bigger harvest!

This year, we’re growing all of our potatoes in cloth grow bags and a couple of large pots. Also, I received some unexpected plants in the mail a few days ago, courtesy of All-America Selections. This included a few pepper and tomato plants, so we’re going to grow them in big pots, too. What fun!

In this week’s “Everyone Can Grow a Garden” video, I finally planted my “gutter peas.” Hooray! Ordinarily, I would have planted them sooner but I was waiting for them to develop a mat of roots so I could easily shake them out of the gutters. Take a look:

Now, if you missed seeing my original gutter pea video, here it is again (whoops! I just discovered that I used the same photo for both videos! But the video below is the one I shot in 2018, honest!):