How to Grow Vegetables in Containers // Container Gardening // Self Sufficient Sunday!

Do you live in a small apartment with maybe a balcony or patio as your only place to grow food? Or maybe you have a larger property but it's either bad soil or covered in concrete. Or maybe you just want to increase the amount of in-ground space you have by doing something different. You can grow more food in all these situations by using containers and I'm going to show you how, coming up. I'm Brian with California Garden TV and if you're looking to join a garden community that offers tips, tricks, and support to help you grow your own organic fruits and vegetables and become a little more self-sufficient along the way, then start now by clicking subscribe and hitting the bell so you get updated every time we upload videos, which right now is three times a week. Let's get growing. So this is our container garden area and right now it is not looking the way we wanted it to look. The ground is supposed to be decomposed granite but because of the stay at home order we have not been able to get that delivered. But no worries, we're going to get started anyway and start planting up our containers. And I've got quite a few things to do so I'm going to take you along with me. Now I haven't had to buy any new containers this year. I'm using everything we already had except for this rain gutter for the strawberries and look how amazing these strawberries are doing already. They look awesome. That just goes to show you you can use just about anything that will hold soil. Let me know in the comments what's the craziest or coolest thing you've ever planted in. Whatever you choose you want to make sure that it will not leach plastic. If you're using plastic you want to make sure it's not going to leach anything into the soil. And there are certain plastics that will and there are certain plastics that won't. I've discussed these in other videos. I'm going to leave a link down below that is going to go over the different types of plastics. All plastics are printed with a stamp that has the recycle symbol with a number in it. And there's certain numbers that are safe, certain numbers that aren't. The website down below is going to let you know which ones are safe so you can always choose the plastics to grow in if you're going to grow in plastic. Now the basic rule is the bigger the plant the bigger the pot. And size matters basically because of the root system. If you grow large plants like tomatoes or runner beans they need a larger pot because they have a large root system that's going to be bringing in water and nutrients. So the minimum you would want for those are five gallons which these buckets are five gallons. Now for medium-sized plants like peppers or bush beans or herbs a three gallon pot like these would be sufficient. Small plants like carrots radish or lettuces a one gallon would even work. Now that's just taking into account the size of the root run but you need to keep in mind that the smaller the pot that you use the more often you're going to have to water and fertilize. Now you're going to want to check the moisture daily. You can look at the top of the pot and it looks dry but just under the surface it could be moist so you don't want to over water. So just stick your finger in two to three inches and if you feel a good amount of moisture they're fine. Let them be. If they're dry then water them. Now as far as fertilizer is concerned I've been using Neptune's Harvest fish and seaweed for years. It's a great balanced fertilizer that's perfect for containers and raised beds. So with that in mind the most important thing about your pots isn't the pot itself it's the soil in the pot. Now I use Kellogg's organic raised bed potting mix. It's available nationwide I believe at Home Depot. Any organic potting mix will do. When it comes to raised beds and pots the most expensive thing about them is the soil that you put in them. In my raised beds which is filled with this there's a lot of hardware involved there but all the hardware was actually less expensive than the soil inside. Now you need to take into account the height of your bed as well. These are 15 inches tall and you have to understand that most vegetables are only going to the roots are only going to go down 12 inches at most. Some say six to eight inches for the majority of the root run. So if your bed is 24 inches tall or 36 which by the way would be a really cool height because you could just stand up and do it. You're having a lot of space at the bottom that you are it's basically wasted space that you're filling with that very expensive compost. Now if you're on a budget and who isn't right now you don't want to take up wasted space and fill it with expensive potting mix. So we want to find something that's either cheap or free to fill up some of that unused space. Now if your container is 24 to 36 inches high or more, lucky you, but you can actually fill the bottom third with organic materials such as logs, sticks, branches, half done compost, straw. You do not want to use something green like lawn clippings because as they rot and break down they produce a very very bad sewer smell and every time you water all the water that drains out is going to have that smell for weeks or maybe months. Don't ask me how I know that. So all of those materials that I just mentioned are actually going to break down over time underneath the potting mix and create soil themselves. But if your bed is 24 inches tall or less or your pots are 24 inches tall or less you don't want to use that same material in the bottom. And the reason is during that process of breaking down and composting they're going to be taking nutrients and most notably nitrogen from the surrounding soil. Now that's okay when it's really deep past the plant's roots but when you're getting near the roots it's going to be robbing nitrogen from your plants. That's nitrogen your plants would have used and so what happens is you're going to get stunted growth, yellow leaves, and possibly dead plants. Again don't ask me how I know that. So we need to fill in some of that space at the bottom of the shorter pots and raised beds with something that's not organic that's not going to rob the nitrogen from the soil. And that's where your recycling comes in. Bottles like this that are food safe which means they're stamped with a number one or possibly five but number one is actually the best. These can be used to fill in some of the space in your pot because they don't break down and they don't leach into the soil. So you can fill in the bottom portion of the containers as long as you leave 8 to 12 inches of space on top for the potting mix. Now this simple hack can save you a ton of money when it comes to filling your containers with quality potting mix. So what can you grow in containers? Pretty much anything. Let me take you through what I'm going to be growing and we'll even get some things planted together. So most of the things that I'm planting in my containers come from the two videos that I did recently. The 12 fastest growing vegetables and the top 10 survival staple crops. So let's start off right here with my potatoes. Now I did this video about I don't know what a month and a half ago planting potatoes and if you look here I've got three containers. I've got a pot, I've got a bucket, and I've got a canvas grocery bag. And they're all doing really well. In fact it's about time to earth them up. So we planted these deep so that the stems would grow tall and we could still fill in dirt. Now just like tomatoes the potatoes put roots out everywhere the stem touches the dirt, the soil. And more roots means more potatoes. So what we're going to do is just take some more potting mix and you're going to fill in all the way up to leave about one to two inches from the top of the pot. Now you're going to be covering a lot of leaves and that's totally fine. So for more information you can go back and watch the potato video I did when I planted these. In fact every video I mention I'm going to link down below in the description. I planted this San Marzano tomato in a bucket on a previous video which I'll link below. And the reason it's planted so deep is the same reason as the potatoes. As the grows we're going to fill in all the way up to about two inches from the top and everywhere that stem touches the soil it's going to put down roots. So it's going to create a really strong healthy plant with lots of roots to absorb moisture and nutrients. Now in these three three gallon pots I'm going to be planting some of my peppers. Peppers are heat lovers and they're actually little seedlings in the garage still right now because the nights are still in the 50s and I don't want to put them out here when it's still too cold it can stunt their growth. So we will be planting these on a future video of how to grow peppers from A to Z. Now in two of these buckets I'm going to be planting squash. One zucchini and one crookneck yellow squash. Now I did have the seedlings coming along in the garage but if you watched a previous video they were attacked by caterpillars in the garage. Don't know how that happened first time ever. So I'm going to start all over again with seeds out here it's warm enough to be planting them outdoors right now. This one is casserta. Now I'm going to plant two seeds in each one of the pots. One for insurance. Now these type of seeds are very flat and so especially in wet climates wet soil you want to stick the seed in vertically not horizontal. The water can lay on top of that seed and rot it so if it's like this there's less surface area. So I'm going to push it down in there about an inch each one. Now always make sure you water thoroughly after planting seeds and label them. Now the third bucket I'm going to be planting cucumbers and I'm going to be planting space master cucumbers and these are from the Cali Kim small space kitchen garden collection. I'll link that down below. They are a small space bush variety that's great for containers and I'm going to plant two of these in this bucket. Might be overkill but one seems lonely. Now these two big pots right here those are going to be my sweet potatoes and if you watched a month or so ago Noah and I started this sweet potato and as you see there's no leaves just yet. I do see some eyes kind of swelling so it should be pretty soon. If you look we've got a good root system going on but I don't see any leaves just yet but as soon as those are out we'll root them and I'll fill these pots up and we'll be good to go with our sweet potatoes. Now one of my favorite things to grow last year was luffa. I think you know that by now. It was a fun plant, a really cool harvest. It was a beautiful plant, pest resistant. It was just great and so I've got I'm going to be planting some in my raised beds. I'm going to plant two in here. I've already got the tp installed and if you want to see how to do that I did a video last week or the week before. I think it was my bed head garden tour and and doing this so that's I'll link that below as well. Now these were survivors from the caterpillar attack but they are strong plants and I think they're going to be just fine. I'm going to plant two in here. I'm going to plant them right next to the pole so that when they start growing they can grab on. Like I said I'm going to just plant two in this pot because they do get pretty big. Now another big climbing plant that needs a big pot are runner beans. I'm going to plant them in this pot right here and the variety I'm planting is called Blauhilde. I think I pronounced that correctly. It's a purple bean. It's got really pretty purple flowers as well. I'm going to plant two seeds at the base of each of the posts about an inch deep. Now one thing I never thought I would grow in containers is corn but you can do it. There needs to be a certain style of container. Now right over here I've got some purple Cali Kim Smart Pot Mini Raised Beds and the reason I like these for corn is that they are not too deep. Corn is pretty shallow rooted. In fact some of its biggest roots are right on top of the ground for support but also it's wide. The thing about corn is it's wind pollinated and that means that the tassels at the top that have the pollen they're blown by the wind and the pollen drifts across and hits the corn silks on each cob and that's what pollinates the corn. But because it's wind pollinated if you grow one line of corn and the wind is blowing this way the pollen just blows over there onto the dirt onto nothing. So you want to plant corn in groupings and so that's why I like the width of these pots. Now when planting in raised beds or pots you can plant more intensively and so we can plant two corn plants per square foot. Now each of these pots is three square feet so we can have six corn plants in each pot. We're going to space them about eight inches apart. We're going to plant two seeds per spot about eight inches apart and push them down about an inch or two. This variety is Stowell's Evergreen. It's a mid-1800s heirloom that stays in the milk stage for a long time so if you have a habit of harvesting too late like I do this variety will still be good even if you wait too long to harvest it. Some more things I grow in pots are my lettuces. I have a new batch coming along here and most of my herbs are in these galvanized metal wash bins. For perennial herbs like this peppermint here, the pot can very quickly become root bound and you're going to need to water it once or twice a day in the summertime. You can already see this got watered yesterday and it's already floppy. So what we're going to do is we're going to divide this. So we're going to pull it out of the container and we're just going to break it in half. It's going to come apart in chunks and you honestly can't kill this stuff. I'm going to break it into four pieces and fill the pot back up with some good soil and pick the chunk that I want, probably this one here, and you just want to fill in around it to the level that this was already growing. Give it a good watering and it will perk right back up and in no time we'll have this pot filled again and you've got three other plants that you can plant somewhere else or give away. Do not plant mint in the ground it will take over. So I hope all this gives you some ideas and some inspiration if you wanted to expand how you grow food or you live in a small apartment maybe you don't have much space and thought it was absolutely impossible. It is possible you can grow any vegetable in containers following these instructions. Now if you're watching and you don't even have a small balcony or patio or you live in a climate that has a very short growing season you still can grow vegetables. In fact we can grow pretty much year-round here so I've never really tried growing anything indoors under a grow light but this coming tomato Tuesday we are going to be starting to grow a tomato plant indoors under a grow light. I've had a lot of requests for that and so I'm actually interested myself because how cool would it be in the middle of January to just be able to go into a back bedroom or your garage and pick some fresh homegrown tomatoes in the middle of winter. I think that'd be pretty cool. Now for you guys in the southern hemisphere this is perfect timing because your winter is coming in just two months. As always thank you for watching if you enjoyed the video or learned something please consider subscribing and give the video a thumbs up I'd really appreciate it and I will see you guys on Tuesday.