Growing a salad bowl of healthy greens – on your patio – is easier than you might think. In fact it’s as easy as one-two-three.  Here are my three rules for growing a garden in containers.

Rule one. K.I.S.S.

Keep It Small & Simple!

Start small. Were you envisioning a huge garden bed with rows of carrots and cabbages? You could do that, but why bother? Get some big plant pots, put them where they will get at six hours of sunlight each day, then fill them with potting soil. The potting soil is the most expensive part of the operation, but good soil grows good plants. Three large pots are a good starter garden.

Rule two. Grow what you like

If you don’t like kale – don’t grow it! I know this sounds trite but many beginning gardeners plant “healthy” things that they don’t particularly like to eat. (Been there and done that!)

There is one problem because you are starting in summer. Especially in Desert Elevations, you can’t plant just anything. Most salad greens you are used to eating are actually cool season greens from Europe and will not survive summer heat. We will come back to this under “Details.” You can get started by considering this list of Warm Season Greens.

Rule three. Pamper the Babies

Pamper the baby plants while they get established. Baby plants – whether young nursery seedlings and sprouting seeds – have tiny roots. You will most likely need to water them both morning and evening until they have enough roots to drink only once a day. A good potting soil helps keep them moist.

One, two, three. It really is that simple. Now here are some additional details in case you are the detail oriented type. Or if you wish to succeed.

Growing Greens – Details

Along the “keep it simple” guideline – it does come down to the four elements of gardening. Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. The fifth element the the ancient Greeks recognized was the unknown void they called Ether. I consider that unknown Ether element the amount and type of care that you may or may not lavish upon your garden. You may be the kind of person that kills your plants with kindness – by over-watering and/or over-fertilizing them. Like the ancient Greeks, I can only define the first four elements with precision.

Earth

I mentioned that good soil is important for your container garden. Potting soil is sold in a bewildering variety of types, and they don’t use standardized terms. (I shall have to do a post just on that topic!) Here’s a few key points.

* Focus on a good potting soil. Top soil is for planting in the ground.

* Avoid potting soil with “added fertilizer” or worse “added weed suppressant.” Either one of these is not good for vegetable garden success.

* Potting soil needs to do both hold moisture, but allow drainage. Perlite (white or grey bits of puffed airy lava rock) helps allow drainage. Organic material such as peat moss or mushroom compost helps hold moisture.

* Do NOT block the drainage hole. Water needs to flow through the soil. Excess water causes drowned roots and dead plants. Your container needs to be able to drain excess water.

Earth – Fill Your Pot with Soil

You need to put soil in all the way to the bottom of the pot. So not put in styrofoam packing peanuts or anything else “to make the pot lighter.” All you are doing is reducing space for roots to grow in and risking plant failure. Rocks on the bottom are not a good idea either.

Changing the composition of the mix from soil to a soil/rock, or soil/stryrofoam mix creates a tension zone barrier. This is often an impermeable barrier for the roots of annual plants. This zone is also an excellent mosquito breeding area for the soil dwelling mosquitoes that are found across the Southwest.

Help reduce mosquitoes in pots with a bit of window screen – as I demonstrate in this YouTube video.

Air

Air temperatures affect vegetables growth. My list of Warm Season Greens includes plants that tolerate higher temperatures. Even Upper Elevation gardens should consider these warm greens, because of the lower overall humidity in the Southwest.

For one example, purslane (Portulaca oleracea var. sativa) is a pretty – and pretty tasty – example of a warm season green that tolerates heat and low humidity. In the old days before hydroponic salad greens in every supermarket, it was the common “summer spinach” in supermarkets in the South and Southwest.

Air is also air movement. A windy site will dry plants more quickly than one that is still.

Fire

The fire of sunlight in summer is intense! Thank goodness we are further from the sun in summer. (Days are longer in summer because the earth is tilted towards the sun in summer.)

I mentioned six hours of summer sun for your container vegetable garden. Much more than that can be too much. A porch that faces to the southwest and has 97 percent shade cloth can work, but it may also cut too much of the sunlight for plants to thrive.

Water

Just plan on twice a day watering at first. Such water needs means that You may have to plan ahead and put your heavy pots full of potting soil close to a hose bib for easy watering.

We are expecting a nice wet summer. If you have your container garden out in the open, know that even with rain you may still need to water your plants. Leaves may block rainfall from hitting the soil in the pot. Plants in the ground can spread roots out towards water. Plants in pots do no have the same option.

Grow Greens!

Just garden with those three rules.  Keep it small and simple. Grow what you like. Make sure you water as needed. As easy as 1-2-3. Happy veggie gardening!

About the Name

“Gardening With Soule” was the name handed to me by an editor over 20 years ago. I was writing columns for newspapers back then. One paper had to be different and had my articles under the heading “Soule Garden.” I dunno, I just think that “Gardening with Soule, in the Land of El Sol” is more catchy.

May I suggest my free Substack newsletter for tips, ideas, recipes, and answers to garden and landscape problems. The link to sign up is also somewhere on this page depending on if you use phone, tablet, or computer to read this.

Thanks for reading – Jacqueline

More Vegetable Garden Help

May I recommend my book?  The Southwest Fruit & Vegetable Guide offers not just growing guides but some of the latest varieties – including ones specifically for raised bed and container growing. Price is about what you would pay on Amazon – only when you buy from me you get a signed copy!

From the review:

“In this updated 2nd edition of , you’ll find much-needed advice and practical tips on growing an edible garden, no matter which part of the southwestern US you call home.

Profits from the sale of this book go to the Horticulture Therapy non-profit Tierra del Sol Institute.  

My Promise: 100 Percent Organic Content

You will NEVER get AI generated anything from me. Not even story ideas. All ideas and all words are from my own brain and my own fingers.  It is Gardening with Soule – not Gardening with AI and Soule. 

Also I DO fact check. In fact, I now fact check at least three times – because “truth is the intersection of three lies.” I have found profound inaccuracies in AI. And since I block AI from reading my pages, they are not learning from my writing.

100 percent organic content in my social media as well. My Tiktok and YouTube videos are entirely generated by me.  On the static media (Facebook) I may occasionally slip up and have an AI image – but never on purpose.

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