How to Plant a Container Garden

To really have fun in your garden, plant container gardens. You can find thousands of choices for pots at home-improvement stores and garden centers. If you look around your garage, you’ll find interesting containers there too. Make sure that the container you select has drainage holes so that you don’t drown your plants. Here’s how to plant a container garden.

What You’ll Need

Potting soil (not garden soil)

Flower pot or container

Plants

Watering can

Instant Green Thumb

Some plants are just made for container gardens. They spill gracefully over the edges of pots to soften the look of the containers. Here are your best bets for trailing plants:

Scaevola

Ivy

Licorice plant

Creeping jenny

Verbena

Calibrachoa

Sweet potato vine

Just Grow With It!

Container gardens are great places to try new plants and interesting color combinations because if you don’t like your creations, you can easily replant them. Here’s a trick for creating container gardens that look like they were designed by a professional: make the plants “talk to each other.” What does that mean? In such a small space, if you choose plants with six different colors, you’ll have an eye-popping garden of color, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you select a group of plants in which each plant has at least one color in its leaves or flowers that is the same as another plant in the grouping, the overall effect is much more harmonious. In this picture, you can see the plants “talking.” Burgundy/red, light green/chartreuse, and dark green are the three colors that are repeated in different ways in each of the plants. Isn’t it lovely?

Step-by-Step

1 Select your plants. Container gardens need three types of plants: thrillers, fillers, and spillers. The pink SunPatien^® in this group is the thriller, a stand-out plant. White angelonia is the filler, planted in odd numbers. Purple scaevola and chartreuse sweet potato vine are the spillers in this container.

2 Fill your container halfway with potting soil. (The bag will be marked “potting soil.”) After you have the container half-full, you can begin placing your plants. Some plants will have larger rootballs than others, so you might should place the largest plant first then add additional soil to the container and place additional plants.

3 Finish placing your plants and add more soil to fill in the spaces between them. It’s important that the plant stems aren’t buried in soil so they don’t rot. That’s why you need to be careful when placing plants in the pots and place larger plants first. Don’t be afraid to really pack the container full of plants. Because you usually grow them for only one season, their spacing doesn’t matter as much.

4 Push the soil down at the edge of the container so that it is at least one inch below the edge of the pot. This leaves room for water to sit and soak in when you water the plant. If you fill the soil to the top of the container, it will all run out when you water the pot and will make a big mess. This is also a good time to sprinkle some slow-release fertilizer into the pot. Add it around the edges and on top of the soil—don’t sprinkle it on top of the plants.

5 When you’ve finished planting, water the container. Give it a good soaking and let the water run out the bottom of the container. Then, wait several days to water again. A good rule of thumb is to water containers when the soil down to the second knuckle on your index finger (if you stick your finger in the pot) is dry. You should also water if the plants look droopy or saggy. Once the plants have grown to fill the pot, you’ll need to water once or twice a day.

Success Tip

Plant a true container “garden” by planting small trees and shrubs in some containers and annuals or perennials in others. Try something new with large tropical plants like palms or bird of paradise as part of your plant combination. Group these plants in different-sized containers on a patio or walkway. You’ll have an interesting movable garden that mimics the larger landscape.

Just Grow With It!

Myth: You should put gravel or broken pot shards in the bottom of your container to promote drainage.

Fact: Don’t do this! You actually disrupt water flow in the pot if you change the materials halfway down the container. It’s better to install a false bottom for your pot. These look like big plastic plates that fit halfway down in your pot to hold the soil and plants up, and you can find them at garden centers and home-improvement stores.

Tip: One way to make it easier to water container gardens is by starting with self-watering containers, which have water reservoirs at the bottom of the pots. A wicking system brings water to the plants. African violet pots are small self-watering containers, but now you can buy big landscape-sized containers too.

What to Plant in Your Container

Colorful annual flowers are a sure bet for containers, but you can also grow vegetables, herbs, perennials, and trees in pots.

Herb garden: You can grow all of your kitchen herbs in two pots. In one pot, plant basil and mint together. They both like to be slightly moist. In the other pot, plant oregano, sage, thyme, and rosemary together. Let that pot dry out before watering.

Salad bowl: Plant salad greens, bunching onions, and even radishes in a large, shallow dish. You can “cut and come again” to your salad bowl for weeks as salad greens keep producing leaves.

Perennial garden in a pot: Create containers that last from season to season by planting a small tree or shrub surrounded by perennials.

Herbs

Perennials + Tree

Salad garden

Perennials