Gardening Services Guide

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If you do not live in a home that has a plot of ground outside that can be used for gardening, you can still grow your own vegetables. You can try your hand at vegetable gardening in containers. Many vegetable plants are suitable for this type of gardening: herbs, small carrots, bush tomatoes, peppers, bush beans, salad greens, and bush tomatoes. You can do vegetable gardening in containers on a deck, patio or porch, on an apartment balcony, or even indoors.

When you do vegetable gardening in containers, be sure to choose containers with a lot of room, because they will retain more moisture than smaller pots. A good sized pot should be able to support three pepper plants or one tomato plant, with some basil planted around it. Containers that hold five to fifteen gallons are best for larger plants. Some excellent containers are large buckets, tubs and halves of distillery barrels. Remember to line them to prevent leakage, rusting and leaching. Pots that are less than ten inches in diameter are good for planting herbs, spring onions and other small vegetable plants. All containers should have holes in the bottoms for drainage. Before putting in the potting soil, put some broken crockery or several layers of newspaper in the bottom of the container. This will prevent fine soil from seeping out through the drainage holes.

Another tip for vegetable gardening in containers is to place your container on a tray of clean gravel. The gravel tray will catch water that drains out of the pot, without actually having the pot sitting in water. This is especially important in indoor gardening, where you do not want floors or carpeting damaged by water. Also, the evaporation of the water in the gravel tray has a humidifying effect that is beneficial to the plant.

For the best results in vegetable gardening in containers, use a high quality potting soil specially made for food crops. Mix in some well rotted compost. When you put your new plants into the container, position their root balls on the potting soil so that the crowns are slightly lower than the rim of the container. Add more potting mix around the plants to a level about an inch below the rim. Then water the plants thoroughly.

Soil in containers dries out more quickly than the soil in your outdoor garden, so water your plants frequently and well. Remember that the nutrient content in a container is limited, and some of it will be washed out by watering. It is a good idea to apply plant food in half quantities, but twice as often as you would with regular garden plants.

Think of the name Tibet, and the images that come to mind are dramatic: the highest mountains in the world, ancient Buddhist monasteries perched upon craggy precipices, and centuries-old villages clustered in isolated valleys. But Tibet is also a land of thousands of species of exotic flora. Perhaps you cannot travel to Tibet, but through Tibetan landscape gardening you can bring some of the atmosphere of that mysterious country at the roof of the world to your own garden.

Tibetan landscape gardening offers many plants with which to beautify your garden. One is the buddleia, a large deciduous shrub. This plant’s flowers are lilac coloured and very fragrant. The slender leaves are a grey-green colour. The buddleia can reach a height of fifteen feet.

Another beauty of Tibetan landscape gardening is the cotoneaster, a shrub that has pinkish-white flowers in summer, followed by a bright red fruit. Sometimes the fruit is black. The round, dark green leaves turn orange in the autumn. The cotoneaster can reach six to eight feet in height and spread.

A close relative is the rockspray cotoneaster. The plant is flat, with herringbone branches. It is one of the most widely grown of the cotoneasters. It blooms with small pink flowers. In fall the foliage turns from dark green to bright red. This plant will grow to a height of two to five feet, and will spread over ten feet.

The creeping cotoneaster is not as hardy as some of its relatives, but it is a good plant for groundcover. It has small pink and white flowers and grows to a height of one foot.

The liliaceae is one of Tibet’s most famous plants. It has pea sized white bulbs that are believed to have medicinal properties, and are dried for export to China.

A favourite plant of Tibetan landscape gardening is the goji berry plant, which is sometimes confused with the wolfberry. The fruit of the goji berry is sweet, while that of the wolfberry is bitter. The goji berry plant grows well in almost any kind of soil, including medium loamy, light sandy, and clay. It does best in well-drained soil. Once the goji berry plant establishes its root system, it stands up well to dry conditions. However, it does not grow well in wet conditions. This plant likes lots of sun, but can tolerate some shade. The goji berry plant can grow up to ten feet tall, and its vines can reach twelve feet. Its trumpet shaped flowers are purple and white. The plant provides its sweet, juicy berries in late summer. This special plant from Tibetan landscape gardening also makes a good indoor houseplant.