DIY Garden Container Ideas

By Ed Smith
Updated on December 10, 2022
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by AdobeStock/Joanne Dale

Start vegetable container gardening for beginners with these DIY garden container ideas. Container gardening can be much easier to maintain than a conventional garden and thrives in almost any spot that gets good sun.

If you don’t have the space or time to have a garden in the earth, you still can grow a significant amount of healthy, tasty food … in containers. Any sunny spot will do, whether it’s in your yard, on your patio, deck or balcony, or even inside your home or apartment. Not only is growing a container garden possible, but it’s fun and fairly easy to grow virtually anything grown in a conventional garden.

In some ways, gardening in containers is easier than gardening in the ground. Container-grown vegetables have slightly smaller yields than plants grown in the ground, but there are fewer, if any, weeds. Some pests are less likely to be a problem, because your container garden is in a location that pests don’t expect to find food. Diseases also are easier to avoid, because your potting soil is less apt to harbor them than ground soil. You need few tools beyond a trowel, and you don’t need to cultivate the soil. Container gardens, at least the smaller ones, can be moved around and brought indoors when frost threatens. And you can set your container garden at whatever height is comfortable and convenient; you can even garden sitting down if you like!

A Garden in a Flower Pot

There are two container options. The first is what I’ll call traditional containers, which consist of anything that can hold some soil and has a hole in the bottom to drain excess water. The second option is self-watering containers, which arrived on the market a few years ago. They have a reservoir for water that is connected to the soil in the rest of the container, which ensures that the water is continually available to the growing plants. As long as there’s water in the reservoir, soil throughout the container is evenly moist.

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