Contest Fails to Germinate Interest

"The Pot with a Purpose Contest" has failed to capture the interest of readers, so there will be no winner. I'd like to thank Renee Shepard, owner of Renee's Garden for sponsoring the contest and hope some of you were able to get some usable information from the related posts. I plan to experiment this year with container gardening and hope to report on my thoughts about them through the seasons. I do hope that if you are planning to do any container gardening this year you'll consider adding some purpose to your pots. Some functions to consider include:

Edible--Renee has an article on the basics of container gardening, and the internet has a profusion of information on the subject. I think I'll try tomatillos in a pot this year, put it in a big pot with a simple support structure, and place it in a corner of a patio where it can burst forth with it's fruit--papery covered small green tomatoes that are great for green chili. I once planted them in a garden bed and the plant promptly took over spilling forth little fruits that overwintered in the soil and sprouted hundreds of tomatillo seedlings the following spring. Actually, I'm going for a Mexican food theme for some of my pots, adding chilies and cilantro to the mix. I'm also going to grow nasturtiums in containers to utilize the blossoms in salads and stirfry. Other blossoms that add interest to food include those of herbs such as chives and basil, as well as roses and violets. Read Renee's article on edible flowers, including some recipes here.

Habitat--Plants represent food to more than just humans, which can be a good news/bad news scenario. Insects and other arthropods feed on plants, and depending upon whether humans have declared them damaging to something we want, the critters are called pests. But there is another category--the beneficial insects--that feed on or parasitize the insects we don't want. These are the good guys/gals that keep balance in the garden habitat and prevent or minimize infestations by pests. An over abundance of pests in the garden is a sign that the garden is out of balance. Too many aphids on your roses? You might want to lay off the high nitrogen fertilizer that caused the rapid, succulent growth that attracted the aphids in the first place. In a healthy garden if the aphids had a sudden population surge, there would be a period of imbalance until a predator ramped up to tame the hordes. In this way, nature acts like a market economy--with supply and demand ebbing and flowing in a balance tuned over millions of years. When we interfere with the incredible, seemingly impossible fluidity of nature by spraying an insecticide, we kill the beneficial insects honing in for the kill, right along with the pests. Purposely providing habitat for the insects we do want helps assure they will be there working behind the scenes to work towards ecological balance in our gardens.

I'll be giving some specifics about how to provide habitat for beneficial insects in the next few weeks, as well as, look at a way to reuse nursery pots and build a bee house to attract solitary bees in order to improve the pollination of my fruit trees.

Nasturtium photo courtesy of redster.