How to Design Your Own Container Garden

Temporary or long-term?

How long you plan to stay in your home will influence your approach to container gardening. You can think longer term in more permanent homes – planting fruit trees that take several years to be productive, for example. Container gardens can be equally rewarding in short-term accommodation, but you’ll want to design them with the likely length of your stay in mind.

How often and how long will you be away?

Plants in containers need regular attention. If you go away regularly or for long periods, you can plan for this. You might have a neighbour or a friend who will be happy to water for you in exchange for picking rights. Or you can look at ways to reduce the amount of manual watering needed or just opt for fast crops such as microgreens during the periods you are at home.

Any special requirements?

Container gardens can be designed to meet specific needs such as wheelchair access. Heights can be adjusted by fixing containers to a wall at the required level or putting them on pallets or strong plastic boxes.

A quick word on ‘beauty’

Gardening programmes and magazines often focus on perfection. But, from working with hundreds of container gardeners, I’ve learnt that you don’t need an aesthetically pleasing or aspirational ‘lifestyle’ garden to get a lot out of growing.

Still, even if you don’t aspire to the perfection of lifestyle magazines or Instagram, you’ll probably want your growing space to look as attractive as you can and it’s still possible to create a beautiful container garden even when using recycled materials.

If your container garden is in a publicly visible space, a pretty collection of pots and planters will also inspire others and be an asset to the community.

Organic growing?

There are several approaches to growing, such as organic, biodynamic and permaculture, that can provide useful ideas and principles for container growing in the city. If you choose to follow one, bear in mind that it may not be easy to apply all its principles.

For example, it may not be practical to make large volumes of compost or weed teas in a small space. Rather than rigidly following the rules of any particular system, I find it more helpful to draw on a wide range of ideas while focusing on principles that nurture all life. It’s also important to acknowledge that many ‘modern’ organic growing methods – and most permaculture design principles – have their roots in ideas pioneered over thousands of years by indigenous peoples in Africa, Asia and around the world. Here are some of the principles I follow:

• I completely avoid the use of pesticides, including ‘natural’ pesticides that contain ingredients like chilli or garlic (any mixture that kills one insect will kill others, too).
• I use homemade fertiliser as much as possible and supplement with purchased fertiliser based on natural ingredients (like seaweed or chicken manure) when needed.
• I recycle and compost as much garden and food waste as I can.
• I’m happy to share a proportion of my harvests with other animals – birds and caterpillars, etc – so my growing efforts help to feed the wider ecosystem.
• I grow a diverse range of plants, including flowering plants, to support pollinators.
• I try to grow open-pollinated plants as much as possible and limit the number of F1 hybrids.

You’ll need to consider what is important to you and work out your own principles, bearing in mind what is realistic given the space, time and budget you have. But you can be confident that if you avoid using poisonous chemicals in pesticides, you will create more life and biodiversity in the city, however you grow and whichever approach or principles you adopt.

Draw a plan

Once you’ve observed the sun in your space, worked out what you want to grow and thought through the practical considerations, you may find it helpful to draw a plan. A plan will help you work out how to arrange your growing space aesthetically and practically. It can be a rough sketch to help you think through ideas or a neat plan drawn to scale.

On your plan, first mark the sunniest and least sunny places. Put crops like tomatoes in the sunniest places. Wormeries, water butts and storage boxes can go in shady areas. If you draw and cut out scaled pictures of your pots, wormery and furniture, you can move these around on your plan like a jigsaw to find the best arrangement.

When working out what to put where, try to think of your space in three dimensions – as a cube rather than a flat space. How can you make best use of all the space in the cube? Where can you grow climbers, add hanging baskets or put shelves? Can you attach strings anywhere to support climbers?

Safety Considerations

Overall, the potential benefits of urban growing far outweigh the risks. But it’s still useful to be aware of the risks, so you can assess them carefully.

1. Weight of Pots

Pots and soil, particularly when waterlogged, can be very heavy to lift and move. Their combined weight and where they are placed is also critical. This is particularly important on balconies and rooftops. A collapsing roof is a real and serious risk.

The number and size of pots you can safely have will depend on the design and construction of the building. The only way to be certain is to consult the architectural plans for the weight-bearing load or to hire a structural engineer to advise you.

If this is not viable, err on the side of caution. Use small, lightweight plastic pots and lightweight soil mixes. You should also avoid large pots completely or place them on top of a load-supporting wall. Try to attach some planters directly to walls, where possible, to reduce the load on the floor.

Moving heavy bags of compost and pots is also an issue to consider for those with back problems or mobility issues. Choosing lightweight materials and using a trolley or a dolly to shift heavy pots can help.

2. Pots Falling Off

Check that any pot on a windowsill or ledge is secured so that it can’t fall or be blown off. Falling pots are potentially lethal and can also damage property.

Specialist gardening suppliers sell brackets and attachments for fixing contain- ers in place. A DIY solution on windowsills is to screw strong metal eyes into the wall on each side of the window (you’ll need a drill and wall plugs), an inch or two below the top of the window box. You can then secure the window box by tying a strong metal wire between the two eyes and tightening it around the window box until it is firmly secured.

3. Air Pollution

Rising air pollution is a concern in many urban areas. However, unless you live right next to a very busy road, the available evidence suggests that the risk to food growing is low to negligible…If your home faces onto roads with very heavy traffic, try and grow at the back of the house or behind a wall or hedge, if possible.

4. Soil Pollution

If you buy compost from a reputable company, it should have been tested for any pollutants. Green compost, made from garden and food waste (and sometimes called municipal compost), should have been tested, but check with your local supplier.

Soil pollution becomes more of an issue if you dig up garden soil to add to a potting mix. The soil in urban areas is often contaminated by past industrial activity. Even if it isn’t toxic, it is often of poor quality and can be mixed with builders’ rubble. You can sometimes get maps from the local environment agency that show areas with known polluted soil or you can pay to get soil tested.