Pros: If you wanna grow small vegetable-like plants(bush type watermelons, strawberries) you can move them here or there, on top of your high rise apartment or in front of your ranch style home. If you are just one person living by yourself, why dig 8-12 inches, apply compost, turn it under, plant your 6 packs of plants and end up with a bumper crop of food you cant even finish when you can just get one plant, one pot, one bag of MG/Scotts/Ladybug/self made potting soil and grow just enough. Speaking more towards the older crowd...Its much easier to container grow veggies than having to till and work the land for the same food.

Con: You are limited if you wanna grow more food but only have a certain amount of space (i.e. a family of four living in a high rise apartment). Though it may be time consuming, that extra soil that you plant your tomatoes/peppers/cucumbers in works as a safeguard to impending disasters. For example, you take two tomato plants and you put one in the ground and one in a 6 inch pot and you water them. Which one will most likely need to be watered first. Moving on, if you container garden you have to find good soil that will not break down/go flat before the season is over. I personally know that if I tried to grow veggies in containers and july and august are hot, then its going to be tough to keep the plants vigorous. Plus theres always the chance of salt buildup and/or fertilizer balance. In the container forum there has been some discussion on fertilizing in containers. Can you grow organically in the ground?...of course you can; people do it all the time. Can you garden organically in containers? Well there is a big discussion on it in that forum.

Hopefully I outlined the main pros/cons to this argument. Both can be done though it kinda depends on your situation

Thank you Joey, for the considerations you bring up. On your recommendation I went to the container forum and found some excellent discussions on soil types and fertilization programs for containers. It will take a few more reads to digest it.

Anyone else have success, or not, growing veggies in containers? If so which vegetables and what size container?

Perhaps I should try to go with something larger than the 5 gal. buckets I have on hand. Sometimes nurseries will sell their old black pots in the 7 to 10 gal. sizes for a few dollars and those could be painted as well. Or maybe I should just forget the idea and plant in the raised beds I have. Incidentally, I live on ground that is mainly rock and caliche hence the pot idea.

This thread on the container forum is about fertilization:

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/contain/msg0323131520631.html?121

P.S. Will someone tell me how to include a clickable link within a message?

Here is a link that might be useful: Container Soils ...

[a href="http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/contain/msg0323131520631.html?121 "]Your link[/a] will look like this -> Your link

.
PS .Thanks for the link. .

Roselee, IMO any plant that will give you enough produce from only one plant will do well, ie: squash, tomatoes or cucumbers. However, anything like black-eyed peas will require many plants in order to have what is commonly called "a mess".

Thank you Carrie! I wonder how large of a trellis black-eyed peas need?

(Still trying to figure out how to post clickable links. Donna is helping me via emails.)

I'm sure you'll get the link thing down soon with Donna's help. It's hard to post instructions because they turn into a link.

You can grow peas and beans on teepees to save room. The article says that it only takes a few plants to get enough, but that's not been my experience since all the peas ripen at different times you need at least a 6 foot row.

A lot of folks on the Container Forum grow everything in containers, I have found it hard to keep things like tomatoes watered that way.

My best results so far have been with herbs and greens like lettuce in the cooler months. Things that are expensive at the store when you only need a little at a time like Basil are great.

It is easier to move containers if you find they are in the wrong place or as the sun moves around the yard during the season.

My friend Lesli sent me some pictures of her fabulous container garden a couple of years ago. I had remembered the containers as being five gal buckets, but she just emailed me that they were 15 to 20 gal. molasses containers.

Also another friend said she didn't think most veggies would do especially as well in a container. That would be doubly true with small containers like 5 gal. So guess I will ditch that idea and think some more on what to do.

I'm in the process of moving some things out of the beds around the tower Bob built. It pains my soul to dig up the larkspurs that are so thick in there, but oh well, one must make sacrifices to eat -- LOL!

I think I'll grow malabar spinach on the tower. It's a pretty plant as well as being edible. It doesn't really climb, but if manually entwined it looks like a vine.

Thanks for any and all inputs!

Here you go roselee!

This code:

gives you this:

This thread on the container forum is about fertilization

This is a test on providing a clickable link:
Crawford lettuce

I think it's working :-) Trying it again: Cluster tomatoes If the clicks work (and it looks right on the preview) I'll copy the code and keep where I can refer to it. Thanks so much.

It works great! You did it!

I keep the codes I use most in a Word Document on my computer desktop for easy copy/paste.

We had good luck last year with indeterminate, cherry-type tomatoes, sweet (cooking) bay, and onions in 18 gallon yard buckets, the kind they sell at Target for $7 each. Greens work better in something that has more planting surface and a little less depth. Maybe big rectangular plastic boxes?

The thing is, it gets old watering 2+ times per day in July and August. The bigger the container, the less the watering.

We're trying potatoes, onions, swiss chard, salad burnet, sweet violets, and mint in the yard buckets this year. Tomatoes, okra, and sweet potato may come later.

The problem with my yard, other than the poorly draining clay soil, is the nut grass and honeysuckle we're STILL trying to kill. Wimps, that's us!

Yard buckets can be hauled inside during really bad plant weather. They are not real pretty, but the lady down the street has had her front yard garden in yard buckets for at least seven years that I remember, and I don't -think- she has had to replace any buckets. It's hard to tell-- last year we lost count at over thirty buckets, and they have creeped around the side of her house to her back yard.

I never heard of yard buckets. Are they like big black plastic pots? Seven dollars sounds like a good price for that size container. I used to buy those laundry baskets with rope handles to grow roses in. Not sure how many gallons they held. I have a friend who grows lots of different kinds of veggies in 20-30 gal. cattle molasses tubs. She lives in sandy gopher country.

What I call a yard bucket, because they're a seasonal item, you may call a laundry basket! Sure sounds like it.

At our house, a 'yard bucket' is a large, brightly colored plastic bucket with plastic rope handles, not quite knee-deep and maybe 18 inches across (dimensions not exact). The older model bucket at Target holds 18 gallons, but there is a newer, smaller model that only holds 17. :-(

Walmart may sell them, too.

Thank you for mentioning the cattle molasses tubs. Those are new to me-- I had been inspecting the rectangular plastic boxes to see if any in the 24+ gallon range might work for gardening.

Roselee, I use the molasses tubs for my brugs....the lids make perfect trays.

Roselee, we did a lot of this in Dripping Springs because we were pretty much on bedrock, lol tirecrafting

another tire link