Is Container Gardening for You?

Container Gardening has been around for quite some time, but in the past few years, it's become really popular. It's easy to understand why. There are a lot of benefits to container gardening, for starters:

• Nearly anyone can grow plants successfully in a container garden. If you're having a bit of a problem bending over to weed, or if you're just not as agile as you used to be, container gardening may be the perfect solution.
  
  
• Set out your delicate seedlings too early? No problem! With a container garden you can just bring them inside until the danger of frost is past. You can extend your growing season a little in the fall, too, by bringing them inside over those first freezing nights.
  
  
• If you're like me, you don't always place your plants in the ideal spot the first time. If your prize plants are located in a spot that is a little too shady (or even a little too sunny), you can just pick them up and move them to a better location.
  
  
• No space? You can easily grow both flowers and vegetables on your patio or balcony. Just be sure to pick the more compact varieties for optimum results.
  
  
• Container gardening is ideal for children. There's less weeding, which, let's face it, is the most boring part of the whole job. They're also likely to need less assistance from adults in prepping the soil.
  
  
• You may have fewer problems with disease. If you start out with clean potting soil, your plants are less likely to contract diseases from the soil.
  

If you think you'd like to try container gardening, there are lots of good books on the subject. (The ones listed below all have excellent reviews from Amazon customers.)

Picture credit: Photograph by Peter Stevens, published on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.