What else can you grow in containers?

So we’ve done courgettes, lettuces and beetroot that are planted out into containers. However, we thought we’d do a few containers that we were going to sow the seeds straight in to.

We prepare the containers in exactly the same way:

1. Put some garden soil into the bottom of the container to provide the pot with some anchorage once the plants start growing.
2. Fill the container to the top with multipurpose compost.
3. Give each container some water to moisten the compost.

In addition, when sowing seeds directly into the container, we then gently press the surface of the compost down to create an even seed bed for sowing.

This time round, we sowed three different vegetables: turnips, radishes and rocket. Radishes we’ve done before, but turnips and rocket are new ones for us!

For the radishes and turnips, we placed these round the container, carefully spacing the seeds out. The rocket seeds on the other hand were so tiny that we did our best to even scatter these – we’ll see how “even” that scattering was when they germinate!

You might just be able to make them out in the photo below. It’s rocket on the left, then the turnips and then the radishes.

After sowing, we gently pressed the seeds down into the compost so that they were just below the surface (where we could). This wasn’t possible for the rocket unfortunately! Then we sieved some more compost over the top of the seeds to exclude the light.

Lastly, we gave each container a light watering with a fine rose watering can to moisten the compost we’d sieved over the top and prevent this from blowing away.

As well as the vegetables we’ve covered to date, there are lots of other veg you can grow in containers. You can also sow the beetroot and lettuce straight into containers (as we have above) if you so wish.

Other crops we’ve successfully grown in containers over the years are: potatoes, leeks, and even a cauliflower!

You can also grow in containers of all different shapes and sizes, if you have containers lying around. For example, you could grow radishes in a much smaller pot that we have here, and then sow fewer, but a succession of sowings to keep you with plenty of radishes in the months to come!