Expert Tips for a Sustainable Container Garden
28.06.2023 - 11:48
/ treehugger.com
Container gardening is ever-popular with city dwellers and those who do not have much space for in-ground growing. It is also popular with those starting out and growing their own food for the first time.
But even those who have a garden can still have containers to make the most of all their growing space.
However, some may ask themselves: Is container gardening really the most sustainable choice? Unfortunately, it can often be less eco-friendly and sustainable than we might wish.
These tips and ideas for a container garden should help you make the most ethical and eco-friendly choices for today and for the future in your garden.
To grow your own food and flowers successfully at home in containers, you will need more than just the containers, something to fill them, and your plants or seeds.
For a container garden to be sustainable—literally able to endure and persist over time—we need to think about what is required to sustain any garden over the longer term.
The first thing we need to think about is where the water we use to water or irrigate our container garden will come from. Remember, container-grown plants will typically need to be watered more frequently than those growing in the ground.
The first must-have for a sustainable container garden, therefore, is a sustainable water supply. This usually means looking at how we can catch and store rainwater on our properties.
Typically, this involves making sure guttering is attached to downspouts on our homes, and directing rainwater to barrels or tanks.
Water might be manually taken from these sources to water a container garden, or, in some cases, directly irrigated from them. Rainwater might also be fed into an aquaponics growing system. But however it is directed,