Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Gardeners in central Texas are always excited to see fall come around because there's so
many things for you to plant, and so many of the plants are so beautiful. Now if you
don't have a garden and are limited to gardening containers, there are many things that do
well in the fall in containers. This is also a nice thing to do for someone who maybe doesn't
want to deal with the heat of summer of gardening but perhaps give them a pot of lettuce and
greens and flowers to get them inspired about gardening during the winter months. Maybe,
who knows, they'll dig a garden later on. So large containers, I prefer clay pots, the
larger the better, really, and you can mix herbs, flowers, vegetables, all together in
these containers. Now in this container, I've got some violas, a snap-dragon Caligula, and
those are all edible flowers that can be mixed in with your salads, and I've got a sorrel
in the middle, that plant will eventually get kind of large, but it's a great source
of salad greens, and cooking greens actually, all winter long, and it becomes a perennial
here too. Also have a little Cole Robbie plant, that one will usually be harvested out pretty
quickly, so then the sorrel is going to have more room to grow. Other greens that I love
to put in pots would include swiss-chard, the bright light swiss-chard is just really
beautiful, I love to put the red swiss-chard with bright yellow violas or pansies or I'll
take the yellow swiss-chard and put it with red pansies. So there are lots of different
color combinations you can do. Also the kale, some dinosaur kales look really beautiful
with the ornamental kales like peacock kale, great with stock and pansies and violas, so
there's just a lot of color. And they're edible pots, you can take the greens off and take
them inside to cook. Some other greens I like to use, I love the look of the red-vein sorrel,
although I'm not as crazy about the flavor as that one, I prefer the green one, but it
sure is a pretty plant in a container. One that I do love is this purple mustard, but
it's actually called red giant, and the leaves just get a beautiful metallic purple sheen
on them and it's a great edible plant, too, it's a wonderful mustard-green. Now I do think
that it's important to choose varieties that are the best for this type of application,
so something like a nasturtium(?) that's a mounding form, it's about twelve inches tall,
is going to be a better choice that's a tall-growing nasturtium(?) that would obscure everything
else in the pot, so look for the variety of how tall things grow when you're mixing them
in this way. Something like this mum is going to give a bit of color, you might want to
take it out later on, be careful and look for the roots, really tightly bound roots
like that need to be loosened up, and actually get in there and don't be afraid to rip them
apart a little bit, they need to be encouraged to grow out and not around and around and
around in your container. Now some plants do have long, deep, tap roots, things like
cilantro, parsley, dill, tend to have very long, deep roots, so they need a little bit
taller pot than other plants, so keep that in mind when you're planting. You may need
to divide them a little bit as they get growing, because sometimes there are multiples in the
pots, like with this dill and this parsley, there's quite a few plants in those, but you
can divide those out and harvest them as you're dividing them. Now, pots like this are very
decorative, they're very beautiful on the patio, if you have male dogs, you may need
to have them up on a table or something a little higher, but I like to fertilize them
with seaweed, I use a Folier seaweed solution about every two to three weeks, to keep them
perky and healthy and if there are occasional cold nights where it's extremely cold you
may need to have row-cover to cover these plants, too, but with all of these pots you'll
have beautiful flowers to enjoy and something to take into your kitchen. For Backyard Basics,
I'm Trisha Shirey. Thanks for joining us.