Beginner Gardening: planting flowers in containers in the ground????, 0 by Jaywhacker

Jaywhacker wrote:
Karen.......I have had a lot of fun and a lot of success growing flowers in pots buried in 3x6 foot raised beds. I grew most everything in one gallon nursery containers. As the dirt in the raised beds settled in due to watering, a perfect pot sized hole would form. You could just lift out a one gallon pot and it would leave a perfect one gallon sized hole. You can move the individual one gallon pots around to your hearts delight. As summer progresses, you can start playing the "move the pot"game. You can move the shorter plants up front and taller ones to the rear. You can even move them around according to some kind of color scheme, if you are the artistic type. As some plants fade out in the summer heat, they can be removed and placed in a "nursery" area. Top trim them and root trim them and stick them back in their pot. Lots of flowers bloom strong in the spring, fade in the summer, and re-bloom again in the cooler autumn weather. You should always have some new and different plants coming along in your nursery area to use to re-juvinate your main flower beds. All it takes is enough strength to tote a one gallon pot. If you decide a certain plant just doesn't meet your expectations, just jerk it out of its pot and throw it in the compost pile. No pain, no strain, no digging. Your garden can consist of many one gallon (or 2 gal, or 3 gal, etc) "pot-holes" that you can fill with whatever you wont to.

A tremendous variety of plants grow very good in one gallon pots, especially annuals. Lift the pots occasionally and snip off any roots growing out of the pots drainage hole. Also lift the plants out of the pots and if they are getting root bound, trim the roots and top to re-juvinate the plant. It will be set back for only a short time while it recovers in your nursery area. Checking your plants in this way will help you determine which plants might grow better in a larger pot......a 2 gallon pot for instance. You are not restricted to the one gallon size but it will probably be your main size of pot. Save yourself a ton of money by using cheap nursery pots, possibly free from your local nurseries.

The key to making this system work good is the "nursery" area I mentioned where extra plants are brought along to be used as needed and where needed.

Perennial plants that you might wont to take with you when you move can be grown in reasonable sized nursery pots. Some plants, perennial and annual, can get very aggressive. They will poke their roots out the drainage holes and grab a big chunk of mother earth if you let them and you will have to chop the roots to lift them out of the grow bed. The trick here is to not let that happen, keep the roots snipped outside of the pots and move those particular plants to larger pots untill you reach the size you need for them. Some plants may be just too aggressive for this system. I am attaching a pic of the roots of a butterfly bush that grew so much in one year that it shattered a 2 gallon nursery container and sent roots deep into the ground. I did not keep the roots snipped on that one. A Mexican marigold mint was even worse.

You can enjoy gardening this way and when you move, just pick up your containers..........and don't forget to fill in the holes.:-) Pot-hole gardens are a lot of fun!