Container Garden Inspiration @NWFGS

Container gardening is awesome for so many reasons. If you live in an apartment or condo, you might not have access to soil. Even if you live in a rental house, you might want to take your plants with you some day. If you have land at your disposal, it might not have optimal soil, temperatures or light for specific things you want to grow. The solution to all these problems? Plants in pots. The Northwest Flower & Garden Show is good at tapping into this growing method, and the display gardens always offer lots of great container inspiration. There is even a container garden competition on the bridge in the middle of the convention center. I got some snapshots of some of my favorite containers.

If you have ever been to our house, you know I have a little obsession with terrariums. Mine grow various mosses, mostly, but it’s very popular to grow little creeping plants or succulents in glass like little living sculptures. I love these fish bowls!

This is The Lusher Life Project. It was one of the competitors in the container garden competition. This was a great garden – like a patchwork quilt of so many types of succulents, old nautical stuff & rusty bits. It was like everything my wife loves in one small garden. The longer I stared at it, the more details I noticed. It was like a whole universe unfolding with endless succulent varieties.

Here’s another photo from one of the container garden displays. Those crazy plants are a marshy/aquatic pitcher plant – a carnivorous plant more commonly found in the southeastern bogs of our fine nation, but you can occasionally find them in adventurous garden ponds in the PNW. They are too fussy for me to bother with, but I love carnivorous plants.

This was from the “Funky Junk” section of the NWFGS. Local high school students create the Funky Junk gardens. This is a step up from the classic cowboy boot planters of my childhood. People plant things in cowboy boots in places other than Oklahoma, right?

I spotted several potted kumquats at the show. I’m considering getting one myself, even though we don’t really need any more small citrus plants in our house. You can make marmalade out of kumquats, so that seems like reason enough to me. Do kumquat blossoms smell as good as lemon blossoms? I need to research this.

I feel like I’m pushing the boundaries of container gardening by including this, but I am a sucker for a gabion-style planter, and these creepy, goth hellebores make my black, wizened heart smile. If I were a goth gardener, I would grow a lot of poisonous hellebores. I love how they hang their heads in shame. Since they are deer-resistant, I should probably grow some anyway.

This container garden is kind of ridiculous but it was popular with the crowd. It’s a garden in a bed! Get it? Garden bed! Yeah. The Barbie dolls are having a picnic! I thought it was pretty weird, but I couldn’t resist taking a photo. And what do I know anyway? Maybe you love it, and I’m happy to share it with you in that case.

growing artichokes in containers

We’re starting to dabble a little more in container gardening this year. We do most of our gardening in raised beds, which I suppose is gardening in containers on a larger scale. But hey, containers are expensive. I’d like to have all sorts of ‘em all over our house and yard, but we’re going to have to acquire a little at a time. We got to venture out to the port of Tacoma to shop for some good quality pots recently at Bamford & Bamford.

We found some of the brightest colors we could. My only disappointment was I was really hoping for something in orange. That’s okay, because I decided to turn some $5 tubs from Target into gardening containers and found bright orange and kelly green.

Five dollars for giant 19 gallon tubs in cute bright colors, with little rope handles! All I had to do was drill some holes. I really liked this idea for adding caster wheels to the bottom. I checked 3 or 4 stores for them and ultimately decided the high cost would take away the great deal I was getting on these containers.

Then Levi helped me with the most gigantic block of coconut coir I’ve ever seen.

I knew he would be on board if I let him spray the hose.

Then we mixed the coir with our garden mix (50% mushroom compost, 50% topsoil) in hopes that these smaller containers won’t get compacted.

We used up some of our river rocks under the pots for drainage.

And a layer on the bottom inside the containers as well.

And in go the artichokes.

I’m testing out one artichoke in these rather generous sized pots.

And I’m trying three in the big 19 gallon tubs. Baby steps toward a nicer looking yard. And if you can’t tell, I do have high hopes for these artichokes.

xo Krista