Container Gardening for All Seasons
Seasoned gardeners have learned to accept that plants have life spans and growth seasons. This is true for outdoor gardens, especially those that see winter's snow. Few garden plants survive the winter frost, and gardeners have to plant again in the spring, or revive the roots of plants that can sometimes come back.
One way you can save yourself the trouble that many gardeners go through is to practice container gardening for all seasons. This will assure you that you have your plants all year round, and that you don't have to go through the hassles of replanting in the spring.
If you're serious about container gardening for the entire year, you may want to invest in some grow lamps. These special lamps emit the kind of light and heat that plants need from the sun. If you have a basement with a lot of space, you can set up your container garden and grow lamps in this area. Just make sure that you have a window down there that you can keep open or slightly ajar so that the air in the room can change or circulate. Winter air can be bad for some plants though, so be careful with keeping the window open all the time.
If grow lamps are too expensive, just keep your plants in warm or slightly humid rooms, and make sure the get a good amount of sunlight everyday. During the winter months, give them as much sunlight as possible. Container gardening for all seasons means having your plants all the time, despite the snow and cold. A truly useful plant to keep around would be an herb plant because this means you can enjoy fresh herbs throughout the winter.
Now, if you plan to use container gardening for winter with the aim of replanting when spring arrives, timing is an important consideration. You have to more or less know when spring will come so that you know when to plant your container garden. Sometimes you can have unusually long winters, and you have to be prepared for this too.
During the spring and summer, choose your best growing plants. If you are planting herbs, choose the best tasting herbs. When these herbs flower and seed, you can dry these seeds to prepare them for your container garden. Most seeds take about three to six weeks to germinate and/or first sprout. So that's already about a month and a half of the cold months. Time your planting period so that your best plants are a few weeks past germination when spring comes. This will be the best time to replant them. You can also choose to plant them in biodegradable containers so that when spring comes, there is no need for replanting, they simple go straight into the ground.
The plants will go through the normal growth periods of flowering and seeding. Before this happens, however, they will be like normal plants. You should be warned that when container gardening for replanting, especially during the winter months, plants will grow slower. So you have to factor this in to your time calculations. You can also choose to have two waves of plants. You can have one that you plant at the beginning of the cooler months or at the end of summer, and another set that you plant mid-winter. This will really make sure that you have plants all year round.
On a final note, it is a good idea to plant different types of plants from time to time. Some plants can “exhaust” the soil, and need other plants to rejuvenate it or allow it to get its minerals back. You can do research on which plants you will need to rotate, depending on the type of garden you have.
