Container Gardens Bring the Benefits of Gardening Into Small Spaces
Backyard gardening is growing in popularity every year. Many homeowners who may have never before considered a garden are now taking up shovels, spades, and watering cans in order to reap the benefits that go hand in hand with growing and maintaining a garden. Gardening is not only a way to create something beautiful for people and animals to enjoy, it is a practical way to provide the family with fresh and nutritionally superior produce. Gardening also offers many health benefits that include decreased stress, improved flexibility, and increased strength and stamina.
Gardening without a Backyard
If you live in an apartment, condo, or other small space, though, you may feel that gardening is not a possibility. How can gardening be accomplished when there is no backyard in which to plant? Anyone living in any kind of small space can still enjoy the benefits that come with gardening because it can be done on a smaller scale. Container gardening allows you to design and grow beautiful landscapes in miniature that can be easily tended in a window box, next to a sunny window, or on a balcony.
How to Choose Your Garden Planters
Choosing the right garden planters for your container garden depends on the amount of space you have available. First, take note of the size of the location where you will place the garden planters. Then, decide which shape would work best – square, rectangle, or circle. What material is preferred – natural wood, sturdy resin, metal, or clay? Be sure that the garden planters you choose are safe for growing edible plants, if that is your goal.
Planning Your Miniature Garden
After you have selected your garden planters, decide what you would like to grow in your new garden. Containers can support a wide variety of plants, including flowers, vines, grasses, small shrubs, vegetables, and herbs. Not all plants like to live in containers, though, so be sure that you select plants that are known to do well in containers. Combining different plants in a container is a creative way to add visual interest: choose plants of varying textures, sizes, and colors to give your container the feel of a “bouquet.” Be sure to choose plants with the same or similar watering and lighting requirements to ensure proper care for all of the plants.
Living in a small space doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy the benefits of growing and tending a garden. In fact, container gardening provides some added benefits that traditional gardening cannot offer. Small scale gardening using garden planters costs less and requires less time to maintain than larger outdoor gardens, so not only can you enjoy the health benefits of gardening, you can also enjoy the money and time saved in the process.
Find More Gardening Articles
