Container Gardening- Winter Veggies

Fact Sheet: Potted Winter Vegies



Presenter: Jane Edmanson, 31/05/2008
Jane pots up some flavoursome winter vegies

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Growing nutritious vegetables in decorative pots not only looks good, but is great fun for the family. It’s also a good idea for people with little space, or who only have a balcony.

Grow the vegies singly in a pot or have some extra fun and mix up some different combinations. Some suggestions include silverbeet in the middle and surrounded by coral leafed lettuce. It’s a really good combination.

Bok choy, or pak choy, is an Asian green that is terrific in stir-fries and soups and a great vegie to grow because it performs quickly. Just cut and eat some of the leaves and then let them keep growing. The other vegetable perfect for this time of year is rainbow chard – so named because of its yellow, orange and crimson stems. It’s a relative of silverbeet. Use it either as a decorative or edible plant.

Potting vegies is straight forward. Remove them from the small pots and gently separate them. They will take about six weeks to grow and be ready to harvest. Fertilise them initially with seaweed fertiliser to give them a good start. Then fertilise every two weeks - liquid feeding is ideal to keep them growing.

And where would we be without lettuces? I love growing them all year but at this time of year, they take off well if grown in a sunny spot. And that’s one of the advantages of growing vegetables in pots - you can move them around to get the benefit of the sun.

Try the wonderful cos lettuce and for an effective look, plant two or three in a pot, and then plant some red leaf oak leafed lettuce around the pot perimeter.

The benefit of many of the other new varieties of lettuces is that as they grow, just cut off the side leaves and leave four or five in the middle to keep growing. They’re called ‘cut and come again’. It’s best to grow any leafy vegetables such as lettuce really quickly. Put them in the sun and keep the moisture up to them. If the leaves dry out you’ll find that they become bitter to taste. Water the pot at least once a week and liquid feed every two or three weeks to keep them growing quickly.

In about six weeks, you’ll find the whole pot absolutely filled with lovely nutritious lettuce. But watch for slugs and snails.

From Gardening Australia