Well THAT Didn’t Go as Planned… | GreenStalk Planting Tips + Container Gardening Do’s & Don’ts

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This was not how I pictured the day going… I was planting out my GreenStalk planters, feeling good, and then—well, you’ll see. In today’s video, I share what happened when my container garden setup went sideways (literally), plus my honest thoughts on what works—and what really doesn’t—when it comes to growing in vertical planters.

Whether you’re new to container gardening or just want a few solid tips, I walk through what I’ve learned over the years, including:

My favorite soil mix for container gardens

How to keep tall planters from tipping over

What not to do when setting up GreenStalks

The real-life reality of growing food on a breezy ridge in spring!

Thanks for spending some time with me in the garden. As always, I hope this gives you some encouragement and a few laughs along the way.

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💬 Have you had a gardening flop lately? Let me know in the comments—I love hearing your stories.

Warmly,
Chelsea

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hello everyone my name is Chelsea welcome to Little Mountain Ranch and to my high tunnel where we are going to plant out three new green stock planters let me show you what a green stock is this beautiful planter here is a green stock planter there are other companies that make a planter that’s similar to this i’ve I’ve heard of people being able to find them at the dollar store and other places i have only ever used the Green Stock brand which I absolutely love they’re really good quality they have held up really well so far to be fair I’ve only been using them this will be my second year using a Greentock planter but I really love them i think these planters are beautiful but they’re also really functional i’m going to share with you some of the tips that I’ve learned growing in a Greentock planter from last year that I’m going to be applying to this year um you can grow both flowers and food in these planters there is so many different cool things that you can do with these um and I’ll put a link for you below to the Green Stock website where you can go and read all of that information in this one I have some micro dwarf tomatoes that you can see here i have some merryolds that are just about to bloom i have some sweet alysum so these are all plants that I started back in March I believe and then I planted this green stock into in my little greenhouse where I nurse all of my seedlings when it’s really cold here in the early spring and then I just put it together and brought it down here when I planted out my high tunnel about a week ago now that’s why they’re so far ahead i actually have some little tomatoes growing on here i have some more dwarf and micro dwarf tomatoes along there and then on the bottom I have some merry golds so I’m going to be planting out three different green stocks today i’m going to be planting them with flowers lots of patunias and then one that I’m going to fill entirely with different herbs and I’m going to go open my back door of my high tunnel right now because even though it’s overcast outside it’s getting really warm in here here are some of the seedlings that I’m going to be using to plant my high tunnel some of these I’ve started myself these sweet little cherry merry golds and lemon balm the wave patunias and a lot of the herbs I purchased at a local nursery which I’m happy to support i have chosen to go with the larger of the two different styles of green stock so the smaller one I think it fits 37 plants i do have one of those and it is filled with strawberries right now up actually you can probably see it from here up over there there are a couple of things that I like about the larger green stock um or that I prefer with the larger green stock than I do the smaller one the cells are a lot bigger so it tends to hold water better and I don’t need to water it quite as frequently it also has a lot more soil in it and you’re going to see what I’m going to do to amend the soil but I find that I don’t have to fertilize it as frequently as the smaller one either that is one thing about container gardening that I will caution you about if it’s something that you’re getting into is that you will need to fertilize those seedlings throughout the year even if you start out with really good soil because those nutrients get depleted quite quick quickly all of the natural ways that um nutrients move through soil when it’s in the ground does not happen in a pot like this so it is important that you fertilize it so let me show you what I’ve done with these ones i also have another 10 of these out behind you here that are filled the same way as these ones are each of these containers takes about 25 L of soil so when you get your bags kind of the medium size bag that you get you’ll need one bag per uh per one of these if you’re using if you’re getting the larger green stock or any of the other kinds that you can find um I’ve seen them at the dollar store even um there’s lots of kind of knockoff brands that are similar in size to this so around 25 L of water not of water of soil good potting soil i use Sunrow organic potting soil i also added some compost to this as you can see the darker stuff here this is a compost so I’m just mixing it in a little bit into the top couple of inches of the planters and then into this I’m going to add a little sprinkle of organic fertilizer this is Gaia Green 444 allpurpose fertilizer and I’m just going to give that a little bit of a mix and I’m going to do the same thing with each one of these planters this is not a a requirement for using these planters last year I actually just used potting soil in them just straight up potting soil i just needed to make sure that I fertilized throughout the season with a liquid fertilizer about once a week i use a um an Alaska fish fertilizer a liquid one that is a fairly gentle fertilizer so I guess I can just add all this into here and then mix it in all at once so there we go all mixed in and fertilizer added i always forget to mention when I have codes for things so I do have a discount code for Green Stock Planters and I’ll put a link for that down below and the discount code is stackable on most sales that Greentock has okay this one here let’s plant out with all of our herbs okay I have some very sad looking herbs here that got both damaged by cold weather cuz I left them out this little poor rosemary got some frost actually and then also these are very very thirsty somehow I missed watering this tray so they’re going to be very happy to go in here so let’s add some thyme there some oregano we’ll put in there so we have a spearmint and a peppermint just going to set those to the side we have a very sad looking Oh my gosh I’m kind of embarrassed to show you guys these they look terrible um we have a little basil there and then another kind of basil over there i have chives but I actually want to put my chives in my garden these are perennial in this area so I’m going to set those aside let’s grab one of my basil over here actually we’ll grab two of them and plunk those ones in there okay I really want to get these planted in here ASAP since they are so desperate for water so you’re going to put this all together once you have these planted so uh you want to make sure that you plant them fairly close to the edge of the pocket pack the soil around there little guys can go in there you guys look nice and happy and healthy i always get asked with the lemon balm what I use it for i just use it for tea my daughter my oldest daughter when she was home she used to use this to make a hair rinse because she had a really dry scalp and it worked really well that’s why I started growing it actually but I like it in tea we’ll see if I can recover this poor little basil i’m sure it’ll be fine now that it’s in some good soil and getting some water okay I’m going to water this one in right away because it is looking so sad i save every container especially good quality ones like this that are going to last for a while for starting my seeds in the spring so that’s something to keep in mind all right let’s water those in so we’re going to give this a really good soak hopefully perk up these poor sad seedlings we’ll let that run in there for a minute so that it can soak all the way down and drip out of the bottom i’ll show you once this has been thoroughly watered how I water the green stock that is already all set up but now let’s move on to this we have a winter savory here and a French teragon looking much happier than those other ones were we have a lemon thyme and a common thyme and a parsley that’s one of my starts okay I think that’s probably good let’s water these guys while we’re here as sometimes happens when I am right into doing whatever it is I’m doing I miss some important things like the battery dying on my camera so I filled this entire planter the original here right down here so I think you guys saw me fill three of these planters out with herbs so I ended up doing or maybe it was only two that you saw but either way I did run out of herbs so I did fill one of them i’m not sure if you guys can see this one um this one with these beautiful merry golds that I had which I don’t mind having it all in here because it’s going to give a little bit of color to this planter i did stick a couple over here too cuz I had a two more spots that didn’t have herbs i did decide to put the mint in here just because I had the space for it so I figured what the heck and look at how much better the mint is looking just with the one evening of being well watered they have perked right up in fact all of the herbs that were looking sad perked right up um into this one I ended up putting the French teragon actually I think this is the one that you guys saw this one I did the verbina the lemon verbina which smells absolutely incredible i did a little tiny pepper here it’s a dwarf pepper so I thought that was the perfect place to put that i do have something you can see on this plant back here in my high tunnel that’s munching on the leaves pretty sure it is a grasshopper we don’t have huge grasshopper issues that magpie is being so loud out there it is early in the morning and the magpies make a lot of noise early in the morning so I apologize for that and this magpie that you can hear back there has actually built a nest in the tree right in front of our house so once those babies hatch out it’s going to be even noisier but that’s okay um anyway I usually only have one or two grasshoppers that end up in here munching on a couple of my plants so it’s never a big enough issue that I need to really do anything to mitigate the problem anyway I did notice that it got in here and munched on this to little leaf as well i also put some more basil in this one u two more of the lemon balm I put in here and then in this one we have the mint we have some margarm and we have that one is not mint i don’t know why that tag says mint that is actually a lavender over there and then a couple more of the merry golds and I’m really happy with the way these turned out so I’m going to move these ones outside and then we’re going to get the ones that we’re going to fill all with flowers all done and then I’m going to show you how to put one of these together i do recommend waiting to water these until they are actually set up just because they are heavy especially these uh deeper cellled ones they do have a bit of weight to them when they’re filled with water okay so the plan with this one is to fill this one with wave patunias and I have a couple of different colors here i have the dark purple over there i have this pretty pink one lipstick pink over here i have some white ones i have some um some more purple ones here some more pink some more white and then I have these pretty ones here that are called easywave silver so originally with this one I was going to do it so that I had a different color in each cell and then when I put it together I would how do I explain that i would kind of stagger it so that there was a swirl of color coming down that was the vision that I had but I don’t have enough of each color to do that so I think I’m just going to make this one a mixed one with all of these colors and then for the next one that I’m going to plant I actually have to go to the nursery oh darn and get some more flowers for that one i don’t know if you guys remember the one that I did last year in the high tunnel i’ll put a picture of it on the screen here for you but it was really beautiful and it had a mix of all different kinds of flowers in it it wasn’t just one kind and it was quite lovely so I think I might do that again just go and get a whole bunch of different um flowers and just fill it with all kinds of different visual interest so I’ve already mixed the fertilizer in with this one and the compost with that good quality potting soil and I did do a little bit of research last night just so that I could share some more information with you guys about these planters and they don’t recommend using like a top soil or garden soil or anything like that gets too compact in these and also they also recommend not to pack down the soil too much in these so that’s something that I wasn’t doing anyway but just to keep that in mind these wave patunias are huge these ones are from waveguarding.com so this was part of my daughter’s um fundraiser and uh yeah they’re really beautiful very big and healthy looking so these patunias are actually quite big and developed so I’m going to actually dead head these guys here so that’s where I’m just taking off the spent flowers and that will encourage the plant to produce more make sure that when you’re pulling off flowers off patunias that you’re actually pulling the green part off too not just this part but actually the whole thing and that will help to signal to the plant to grow some more blooms for you these ones are pretty well-developed i prefer this time of year to get smaller plants like this because they don’t they’re not spent as fast as these guys are but as long as I keep these pruned back we should be okay for these are really big um okay well into the summer anyway so dead heading these guys here this is going to be so cheerful i don’t know if I’m going to end up with enough flowers for this one these have six cells per one and there’s five tiers altogether on this so you can fit a lot of plants in to one of these it’s actually quite remarkable okay we’ve got purple let’s put in one of these pretty little easy wave silvers in here it’s going to look a little bit out of balance with these smaller ones for the next bit but I’d be curious to know we had a membership meeting last night and so many people from all over the place from Australia to the Midwest all talking about and to up here where we are talking about the cold wet couple of weeks that people are having and I’m curious to know where what the weather’s like with you except for Texas we do have a member from Texas and she was saying that it’s just been absolutely blazing hot um there but everywhere else has been quite cool and wet we fortunately are going to have a shift in the weather there is supposed to be a bit of kind of overcast weather today but it is supposed to hit 20° so that is that’s Celsius friends um so that is awesome because we definitely need some warm weather okay all righty let’s pull this one out of the way let’s fill up our next one everything mixed in here this one could use a little bit more soil so we’ll do this one instead because I am actually out of potting soil these do take a lot of potting soil to fill so something to keep in mind like I said 25 L bag is uh how much these particular ones take these are so pretty i love tunias they are just lovely lovely annuals look at the root bound action happening on that one it’s going to be happy to get into here to some fresh soil more space maybe I will have enough to be able to do the little pattern idea that I had with the swirl with these we’ll see one of the things that’s important when you’re setting up one of these is that you have it on a flat surface because it can affect the integrity of it it can fall over um this is a spinning bottom and it does come with wheels that go on the bottom but I don’t use those because I don’t need to be moving mine around so we’re going to set this up right here this is not going to be its permanent home so I’m not that worried about it being perfectly level but we do want it level enough so that everything sits mostly straight so we’re going to set our bottom on here that’s not really that straight okay so these have these little notches on them and then they just fit over top of the green stock they just click in it’s kind of obvious when you see it so we want to put this so the pink one is over here you need to go around and pull out the ones that are going to get kind of stuck in underneath there we go oh shoot i missed a step one second we need to add This is the watering system so these go in each tier and they have little holes in them so you want to line up the holes so that they’re over each pocket and then um when we water through the top the water goes through fills these up and then runs down to the one below and then I think I shared this when I was watering that other one you just wait till the water comes out of the bottom so we’ll put one of these on [Music] here and then we’ll put this on top [Music] so that didn’t go very well all that work oh my gosh okay so having it on a very level surface is very important you can’t uh mess around with that because um otherwise that happens i couldn’t show actually when it happened because I said a bad word so okay so now I guess I’m setting these all back up again i have a concrete walkway in front of my house so what I think I’m going to do is put all these back together and then um and then bring them up and actually just set them up on that path because then we can move them up onto the deck when we’re ready to do that uh because I don’t want that to happen again one of our members of the LMR membership they had a big windstorm and had theirs blow over so definitely keep that in mind super level if you’re going to have really strong winds maybe move it up against your house where it can have some protection from the wind and don’t try to uh move it or straighten it out when it’s not on a level spot because otherwise that will happen ah my family came and helped me move all of those green stocks up to the house except for the one that I hadn’t yet filled that one’s behind me here and as I was walking by all of my trays of plants that are scattered all over the place I decided to see if I had enough that I could fill this green stock with some beautiful flowers now where I’m standing right now is where my green stock from last year the one that I had filled with strawberries was standing i do have a You can kind of see it under the grass here a concrete pad here to keep it level so I moved that one so that from this angle when you come in through the gate of the garden you’d be able to see a green stock here filled with flowers that’s the way that I had it last year i just put the fl or the strawberries in it for this year which I’m honestly not sure if I’m going to keep or not um keep the strawberries in there but we’ll leave them in there for now i’m going to put them somewhere else over that way but this area here I need to get the grass weed whacked down because it is very long and then set up this green stock and fill it with all of these beautiful flowers i have deraniums i have super tunias i have sweet alysum i have what else do I have merryolds and a few other things so I think we’re going to be able to fill it out and make it look beautiful and bright and cheerful i still probably will take another trip or two down to the local nursery this year and just pick up a few odds and ends to fill up empty spaces in my garden but I planted more seedlings this year than I have ever done in the past i think there was somewhere over 2,000 seedlings i’m not going to have to buy too many things so that is a really good feeling definitely saved a lot of money doing that so I’m just going to get this area here weed whacked down and then we will set up this green stock over here and Alex has come to visit there is very little that I find as satisfying as weed eating it’s the best okay so what we’re going to do now is find our pad underneath all this grass okay we’ve got our [Applause] base going to put one of these pansies in each layer geranium wave patunia a very sad looking sweet alysum with a little chingula in there as well and a a super bell’s magic pink lemonade beautiful super tuna and a merry gold in this one so this little pipe goes on the very bottom just for the water to run out the side but it doesn’t matter if the water just runs onto the grass here so we shall leave it have any of you ever overwintered geraniums inside i know some people who have and they have geraniums that are like 10 years old that they just bring out in the summer and bring back inside in the winter time i have not tried that before so I’m basically doing the same thing I did with the patunia one where I am doing them so it kind of looks like a swirl of the different plants going around probably won’t be quite as effective with this just because there’s so many different kinds of flowers here but that’s okay it’ll look wild and beautiful which is kind of how I like my garden isn’t it have this little top that’s so cute these are new i didn’t have one last year but it’s just to keep the bugs and the bees out of the water um spot here and I have noticed that with my one that I have in the high tunnel that doesn’t have one of these covers on there bees do get stuck in there so I’m happy to have that because my honey bees are just down below us here it also keeps the dirt and the leaves and stuff out from the water vessel so I am happy with the way that turned out it’s going to look very nice when it’s all in full bloom so I have two other things I can plant right now and well I don’t know where I’m going to put them yet i do have enough flowers to fill these up i have a couple of these orange colored two more of the pink ones so these are going to spread quite a bit kind of form like a dome of beautiful patunias so I’m just going to put two in each one of these pots okay these ones are now done i do have some mess that I need to clean up there but I’m going to do that after we’re done setting up the green stocks up by the house because I want to see all those ones all put together and then we’re going to be done this took me much longer than I had anticipated because of that one falling over but it’s still fun and I just adore these planters i just think they look so cute you’re catching us mid project here i’m just getting ready to build some flower beds around the front of the house i can’t wait to show you that when it’s all done but the logs have all been refinished and they look wonderful dan is in the process of building a something decorative to cover up those ugly meters over there and then we have some hanging baskets that I can’t wait to get hung up but that’s not what we’re here to do let’s get these set up where am I going to put them they’re going to kind of be in the way here but that’s okay that’s better than them being somewhere and falling over so let’s put one right here and let’s put the patunia one right there one down looking a little sad but it will perk up and now for the herb one h maybe we’ll put that one up here there that looks lovely i love it so I just need to put the covers on top but I’ll wait and do that later i’m going to give them a good soak right now i just love them don’t they look beautiful smells so nice right here coming in through the front gate so pretty all right friends that is going to be it for me today i hope that you enjoyed hanging out with me i certainly enjoyed hanging out with you and I look forward to doing it again very soon and have an awesome day everyone bye