Container Gardening Secrets of Success!

How to design and plant an abundant container garden…Here’s How!
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Good morning everybody I felt very inspired to make this video for you today because the Potted Garden the container garden is beginning to grow in a sort of very abundant way in much the same way as the three acres here have grown there seems to be little bits of magic

Happening at night when I come out in the morning it just looks bigger and more Lush so this video is all about growing in pots and containers and how to do so successfully and how to recognize the signs in all your plants when repotting is needed when feeding is

Needed let’s delve into it so this is a little bit of an update on my inner Garden I’m I continue to add to the pots it’s it’s an Ever growing garden and a Movable Feast so as some plants flower I can bring them to the four and as others

Lose their flowers and begin to leite I can put them into the background you see the pieras there which is a beautiful a beautiful plant very underestimated actually and uh one of the benefits of having these plants in containers is that you can be very specific with the

Soil type so the Pieris requires acid soil now I’ll show you a Pieris which is in a pot but actually planted into the ground okay so I haven’t actually cleaned up this bed yet but you can get the general impression of how the Pieris looks with all the new foliage and it does

Flour as well now it’s in this old milk churn which is actually a bottomless Churn it doesn’t have a bottom on it but all the soil in there is acid soil and every so often I build up a little bit of acid soil around the base as

Well I’ll just pull back so you can see that it’s a beautiful shrub but grows almost like a a small tree tree so you have this height and elegance again the fact that it’s in a container it’s in a pot means it can be potted on as it grows until you get it

To a stage where you can then put it into the ground by taking the bottom out of the pot I’ll show you some more around the side of the cottage just before we go on to the Gable of the cottage this is another Pieris which is flowering and you can see those

Beautiful flowers there and that’s already been potted on I had that growing in a smaller pot now it’s gone into a bigger one let’s go around this is the Gable end of the cottage on the on the western side and I’ve got quite a few pieras growing here now the variegated ones are

Absolutely stunning because you have the variegated um leaves all the way through um because they’re mostly sort of Evergreen they don’t really lose their leaves this one is in quite a big pot you can see I’m very happy there and that does need to have a few of the little dead

Bits cut off but that’s something that I will do later on and this is a beautiful variegated one look at this and it’s in a big pot and we’ll be happy in there actually for quite a few years to come another variegated one you can see how much I love the

Variegation and that’s in a huge pot so that’ll be in there again for years to come now I have another one around here I’m just trying to find it oh no this is this is the very gated red dandrum actually and again that’s in a big pot let me just go around the

Other side of the bench look at that big pot there and it’s getting some beautiful buds on it stunning flowers on this when it comes out and it’s beside another Rod dandrum again you see these grow in the shade and this is the north side of the cottage there’s another uh little pierus

In here again it’s in a pot because my soil here isn’t naturally acid soil there’s little pockets off it hither and thither but it’s very hard to determine without doing a soil test so the Potted Pieris does really well and there you can see this beautiful little it’s it’s

A bit more of a miniature Pieris as you can see from the size of the leaves and the little flowers beginning to come out this is why I’m beginning to favor container gardening because again you know it’s it’s a beautiful Movable Feast you can switch them round move them

Around if something isn’t doing too well in a particular situation you can find the best situation for it and you can build up a garden that looks really um well is very natural um because each plant is quite happy in its situation so if you look over there beside the porch all those

Are in containers with the exception of the for green and all the way along the front of the cottage against the wall containers and also here of course on the G end so let’s have a look at some more containers some of you may remember this tree which I bought in the

Garden center originally as a little Christmas tree as a little Ule tree um in a pot and I actually had that indoors and decorated I think it was about two years ago possibly three anyway I did bring it outside I um let it sit in its original pot for a

While I fed it and watered it and then transferred it into this big blue pot and it’s doing really well and indeed will at any point I wish serve serve as a Christmas tree again lovely very healthy look lots of buds on it it will drop some of its

Needles but look at that good growing you can see the two Corder lines in these pots they’ve become pot bound and you can tell because they look a little bit diminished so it’s time to get those out of the pots and into the ground because I don’t think um putting them into

Bigger pots is going to do them for for very long they’re they’re very um active plants they they grow pretty quickly as long as they’re not decimated by hard Frost and the hard Frost would have to be continuous hard Frost by the way so that’s a little uh job for me to

Do now where containers are in short supply um because containers can be expensive to buy but I mean you can use all kinds of unwanted um objects as containers here two tires two tires and I’ve got the most magnificent see look at this there’s even a bird’s nest up there look at that

See and this of course is the beautiful and vigorous catas Montana growing out of two tires and lots and lots of flower buds coming on there look at that covering the shed look how strong these look look at that amazing just from two [Applause] tires

And here you can see the stages of a roded andrum now this is one which I bought recently so I’ve reparted that into a slightly bigger pot than where it was and then if you look behind this is one which is in a bigger Po and then ultimately got this beautiful one here

Beautiful shape very happy in that pot and lots of fresh buds takes about 3 years to get it from this in the little pot to this and in between you’ve got this one I showed you some lemon Bal in the pre previous video well here’s some

Lemon Bal in a pot and again it’s a cutting they’re they’re very vigorous plants they grow very easily virtually in any setting very resilient and will give you lots and lots of lemon Bal the one beside it here is bous and for cyia the same rules apply

Grow them on and pots until you can see they’re becoming a little bit pot bind and then release [Laughter] them that’s when they go mad so here’s some Foria that I released into the wild earlier I think this is about 2 years ago let’s have a look at it isn’t that

Lush and just while we’re here a bay tree growing out of two tires and unpruned allowed to grow in all her magnificence and again look at this let me just look look at the size of these leaves see there you go look at that now I think there’s a bird beginning to

Nest in it and of course this little this little site here at the back of the shed faces into the South even though on the southern side there’s a lot of plants and this beautiful fielded Maple so continuing with the theme of container gardening all these plants here

Bua tadas Montana at the back ribes and Ivy all in tires so contained in that sense and then struggling out here at the front self- seated is some beautiful um gosh look at this look at this look look look is that lovely aquala the beautiful aquala I love how it holds and the

Little droplets of rain a little bit like um ladyes mantle AIA mollus yeah isn’t it beautiful and again that Dad herself seated in the gravel there’s lots and lots of it around the cottage that will be flowering and the next months and um I’ll be able to show

You just all the beautiful colors it comes up in so you can see more self-seed acry Leia here there some more on the other side lots and lots in here in the gravel and they self seed so readily and so easily so I think it’s a very productive thing to do when you’re

Creating a container garden or a potted Garden to lay it on a bed of gravel and preferably gravel that is not sitting on top of a membrane because you want the gravel and the Earth to connect because the gravel warms the Earth and it also is a wonderful place

For plants to seed or for you to scatter seed into which is what I’ve done with those two boxes of wild flower seed do you remember the ones that I bought several weeks ago well I made a point of going round this area all the way around where

The plants are wherever pots are in plants are I’ve scattered lots and lots of wild flower seeds including around the front of the cottage and the Gable so it’ll be interesting to see those come up through the gravel as the season progresses and last but not least I

Often miss out this particular corner of the container garden because I don’t know why it’s just I seem to miss it out when I’m filming so I’ll just give you a little run through what’s here so again um cheap and cheerful in fact zero cost two tires and these come off my own

Vehicles by the way I try to recycle wherever I can two tires are filled with some Earth and planted out with pyan and Honeys suckle and you can see the Honeys suckle is made making a great move vertically up there towards the top so I’m going to put a little bit of

Trellis in here so it can kind of ramble along the trellis here this is a very unusual looking little shrub and it’s hard to believe but it is actually a bay tree and it’s a bay tree that I haven’t shipped and I haven’t pruned and I basically left it in this

Pot and uh it’s become a little bit pot bound but it’s sharing the pot with some beautiful dog daisies um so it’s become a little bit stunted and growth and because of that look how tiny the leaves are look compared to my fingernail there see that’s going a little bit yellow so

I will have to give it a feed but if you look look at that and compare it to my other bay trees that are not pot bind let me show you this one is in a pot but it’s in a pot where it’s not pot bind

That’s a little deer’s head that I found in the forest and I thought it was so beautiful and I just wanted to bring it home so yeah look at this much bigger leaves let me show you there’s my fingernail compar compared to the leaf and not pop BN because you can see

There’s no yellowing I’ll show you another one that’s growing in a little bed a little miniature bed but again you can see the leaves are long very healthy this is a little bed that I made literally by just piling up some stones into a circle putting some Earth in and good to

Go I think I’ll finish this video with this beautiful viburnum and that’s in a pot and I must sort of um um cut off some of the lower branches so the pots revealed and a little bit of cloud pruning as they call it there’s another one

Here that will need to be parted off perhaps at the end of the summer but this one’s quite happy it’s settled in well and there’s the pot it’s got another couple of years left in that pot I’d say before it will be taken out and probably planted into the ground