So, I’ll continue to use plastic milk jugs as planters… but I’ll also limit my expectations for them: some plants simply require more soil than you can put in a milk jug. For those, I’ve been considering the plastic “nursery pot” bags that at so inexpensive from garden suppliers… though I still like the shopping bags. Some of my gardening friends have found reusable grocery bags that don’t deteriorate in sunshine.

-Daniel

Few traditionally-gardened edible plants will grow to maturity without angst in a one-gallon planter. Popular plants such as tomatoes, potatoes, egg plant, and peppers are very large plants and would overwhelm even a three-gallon container… I mentioned in this post or the one before it that container gardeners consider a five-gallon planter to be appropriate for a tomato plant. It will handle many other vegetables as well. (I love those shopping bags as the ideal size for container gardening most vegetables.)

That said, you can grow a whole bunch of produce in gallon-sized containers if you’re willing to eat it young. And why not? Lettuces and spinach are tasty at any size until they put out flowers. Herbs may want to grow huge, but many tolerate aggressive pruning & harvesting, and they keep sending out new growth as you cut off the tops to use in your cooking. As long as you accept that your plants will outgrow the containers and probably fail, you can harvest from them happily until that happens.

Also: plants will tolerate crowding way beyond what the seed packages tell you. I encourage people to plant tight and thin as appropriate. This strategy will let you grow a lot of food in a small pot… again, until it chokes itself or you transplant to a larger container.

Finally, you can trick more growth out of crowded plants by feeding them. They won’t be able to draw enough nutrition from the soil once they’re root bound, so they’ll benefit considerably from regular feeding of plant food.

A few I’d try in a milk jug: Leaf lettuce and spinach. Beans… especially climbing beans – two or three (well, I’d try nine, but I haven’t yet) per jug with something to climb. To get enough to eat in a single meal, you’ll probably need to have four or five jugs of beans going at once. Short varieties of carrots – try to distribute them to have one carrot per square inch of surface. You might harvest 20-30 carrots from a single jug… but take some when they’re young, and let others mature. Onions from sets… maybe three or four per milk jug (unless you plant Spanish onions). Basil – perhaps the most popular container herb. Just about any herb will work-even perennials. I had a thyme plant last about six years in a container that was smaller than a gallon.

OK, this could have been a really inadequate blog post, so I’ll stop. I’ll talk more about some of this throughout the growing season, so please stay tuned. Also, there are other bloggers who focus exclusively on container gardening, and you’ll find some great stuff on their sites. One I just met is: Kerry’s Container Gardening Blog. I’ve only glanced at it, but it has some topics appropriate to kitchen gardening.