Organic Container Gardening – Step By Step Guide

Phil: This is Amsterdam.

H: It’s Amsterdam.

Phil: This is Amsterdam.

Hey guys it’s Phil from smilinggardener.com and beside me I have.

H: H, Phil’s sister.

Phil: And we are in

H: Amsterdam.

Phil: They often meet people at parties or at events and tell them what I do which is to teach people about organic gardening and growing food. I do this though a website, it is called smilinggardener.com, it’s more for people who have gardens, where they really want to put in the work to grow really nutrient dense food but I always wish I had something to share with them, that will just a little bit easier, just for a casual gardener to do. So that’s what we are going to be doing today.

H: Doing container gardening, so urb gardening for if you don’t have a big garden, if you live in an apartment or live in the city and you just have a small space.

Phil: Everything you have to do is setup, even if it’s just one container or a few containers, it could be in your house or it could be on your balcony, getting your container, getting potting soil, getting plants, fertilizer, water and planting it, maintaining it, harvesting it all that. So whole bunch of maybe like it does in videos [indiscernible 01:13] I could live in nature.

H: Beautiful, I would live in that, so today we are going to go over to the [indiscernible 01:18] which is the local garden center here and we are going to take a look at what they have and what we need in order to put together some container gardens.

Phil: If you are on my website on this page or if you are on YouTube or Facebook you can click a link and go over and there will be text and videos, step by step instructions for how to setup these containers, so it’s going to be fun.

H: Yeah.

H: We are at back of my dormitory of my University, we are here today to talk about pots, no not that kind of pot, containers. Why don’t you tell the good people what they should look for when they are choosing out container for gardening?

Phil: Well I mean there are so many different options for the material but if you just keep it simple and get something that is nontoxic especially if you are growing food, you don’t want toxins to be going into your food and that should have drainage holes because when you water; otherwise it’s gonna get too wet, so you need to have drainage holes.

H: There is a river and some swans.

Phil: What I want to talk about the main ones people use, first of which is like a clay pot, terracotta pot; you can get them either glazed or unglazed. Unglazed they have a very natural kind of finish, the nice thing about them is, it’s gonna be a lot of air going into your roots. The problem with that is, I mean you don’t have to water more frequently because they are very porous. If you get a glazed terracotta pot, I will show you some of them that are really nice, I mean they can be painted very nice but that’s going to block some of the airflow, that means it’s gonna to hold water better, it’s also you gonna need a lighter soil mix to make sure there is enough air getting in there, so that’s when you want to use some more perlite. The other main one, people would use, so there was a clay. The other one is a plastic one which is often kind of looks like the clay but it is made of plastic. It’s a lot lighter, it’s going to be nonporous, so it even needs a lighter mix. It’s gonna hold a lot of water. If it’s a dark colored pot, it’s gonna get very hot, if it’s outside.

H: What if your pots are inside, where is the water going to drain to?

Phil: Good question, a tray next. The other thing you want is some kind of a tray on the bottom especially if it’s inside, a tray to capture that and you can be like a terracotta tray or could be just a plastic tray, good enough.

H: I think so, we have a little community garden here at the dormitory and we found these pots that are full of some plants right now but we thought why not go ahead and reuse them, not it is setting there, so we have yeah a couple of terracotta plastic. We will have nice drainage holes.

Phil: And they are big enough, a lot of people will try to plant there little herbs into like a little yogurt container or something which is kind of cute and looks cool but those roots are gonna run out of space really fast and so you want something bigger, so that the roots have a chance to expand and that allows the top to expand. Okay, cut.

H: How would you choose a potting mix?

Phil: If possible just get something organic and they are all going to be fairly similar but like it’s organic it wouldn’t have chemicals in it, you wouldn’t have sewage sledge in it. it’s gonna probably have some [indiscernible 00:23] even though that’s not ideal but hopefully I will have some compost in it and maybe some [indiscernible 00:28] to allow more air in there. You don’t want to use straight soil because it’s gonna be too heavy and not enough air in there, so just get an organic potting mix. People are playing soccer.

You can make your own by going and buying some compost and some top soil and some sand maybe some [indiscernible 00:48] those are the main four but if you just getting, making a few containers like we are today, mix a lot more [indiscernible 00: 55] to buy some potty mix, preferable if you can get organic and might say OMRI listed, OMIR listed or it might be certified by another organic agency, that way you know you are really getting something organic, [indiscernible 01:06] which we don’t really want because [indiscernible 01:10] are very important ecosystems that we would rather not be touching and more harvesting them too quickly and we are not restoring them which is difficult to do anyway, but even if you do get an organic mix, you might have to get [indiscernible 01:20]. So you are filling up our pots.

H: Yeah.

Phil: So we in the garden center today we had a lot of choice but it wall in Dutch which H can read a little bit but they didn’t list the ingredients, so we didn’t know exactly what was in there. In this case we already had like the dormitory here, already had our bags so we are using it and if you look at it, it looks to me like it has compost and [indiscernible 01:43] test. If the potty mix doesn’t have any lime in it, if you happen to have any lime that will bring up the calcium level, if you have calcitic lime or we will bright up the magnesium and calcium level if you have dolomite lime, doesn’t really matter to me what you use for that. Now I would use about 1% calcium, so your mix is you known just use 1% of the mix as calcium. The other thing is if you have, this is again more advanced and it’s a little bit of work to find this, but gardeners who are organic and now into kind of thing we might be able to find it, that’s rock dust, either a glacial rock dust or a volcanic rock dust. Bring about 5% of your mix as a rock dust and that will bring all kinds of minerals in there, so that you plant has the minerals. It needs to become healthy and nutritious for you, good.

H: I think that’s great.

Phil: Now it’s time for plants and what I think we should grow these herbs because we can just herb, I like herbs because you harvest a little everyday, if you try to plant a vegetable you are going to run out very quickly and many vegetables prefer a bigger soil environment but herbs are great. Don’t bother starting from seed because for many herbs you going to wait a couple of weeks for that seed to germinate, it’s a big you need extra gear and start, so yeah just buy plants whatever looks healthy, whatever you are going to use.

H: You want to make sure that your plants look healthy so that’s no pest, there is no 00:47, there is no white flies, you don’t see any insects on it, no moles, no mildews, no fungus. You want to pick a plant that just looks fairly robust, so looks fairly full. When they looks like it’s been watered well.

Phil: Yeah because I often notice just the ones on the corners or the ones in the middle or whatever, sometimes you don’t get the water, so if you go in and see it’s bone dry, maybe hasn’t been watered for awhile, just get one that is nice and wet.

H: Yeah looks like it been cared for. You want to go like this, like brother and sister, what’s that thing that people use to.

P: Do I end the shot.

H: No

P: I can tell.

H: Yeah.

P: Oh, am I in the middle.

H: Yeah, look at my foots over here.

P: Oh, good. We want to get one that 1:30 use.

H: Yeah, so we chose today we got some parsley, some dough here and basal. Just things that we thought we would enjoy eating. So you can grow time, dough would be great, oregano Chives, basal, those are all great for full son.

P: If you have more shade, I think some of the one you can do a bit of better in shape would be like the parsley to take it.

H: Yeah

P: I think chives can go pretty much anywhere, that pretty easy

H: Lemon balm.

P: Lemon balm, mint. Mint is really nice to grow in a park because you don’t eat, lot of us we don’t to put it in our garden because it’s spread all over the place. So if you put in a pot you can keep the contain.

H: I think we said enough.

P: Okay.

H: Okay.

H: Let’s talk about plants.

PHIL: Okay.

H: You do the talking, I will do the listening.

Phil: When you are growing plants in containers especially when they are inside, it’s a very unnatural environment for them. They don’t have their microbial partners in the soil and it’s even the case in our gardens because of pesticide used or just air pollution or tilling are all kinds of things we often have lower bacteria and fungi than we want and so we always are trying to improve that as organic gardeners and the main way to do that is good compost.

If you can find that, now that’s hard to find and hard to decide for that but if you have some locally made worm compost that’s usually very nutritious, like those in your soil, it has nutrients but also has beneficial microorganisms to establish that soil ecosystem. They protect your plants from disease and even from some insects by being right all around the root zone and all over the leaves and being like a first line of defense up there.

The other thing we do is, we feed nutrients to your plants and then the plants feed them carbohydrates in returns with this bartering system than happen, so your plants really get protection and food and water, especially a lot of the conventional party mixes even organic ones becomes sterile. We want to reintroduce these microorganisms, so one way to do that is to bring some compost in worm compost is really great, if you can find some in your area or you can make some itself, there is also another one I really love called effective microorganisms and it’s a liquid you buy from amazon.com or other places online and you mix it with water sprayed on your plants and on the roots and on to like on the soil and the leaves, it inoculates them with these beneficial microorganisms and it’s basically a liquid.

It just really like less than 20 different species of mostly bacteria provide amazing benefits for plants and what you do is you spray them onto the plants, our spray bottle isn’t working, so you are going to be spray, that’s your contribution to the video.

H: I went to university.

Phil: And you can get a bottle for say 20 to 25 dollars or sometimes even less on amazon and the results are incredible and their other usage for humans that I am not going to get into today but this is the one thing I recommend people do even before fertilizing, we are going to talk about fertilizing in the next video and that’s all for this one.

H: That’s all folks.

Phil: So we talk about fertilizers, how about you go first.

H: Okay, so first of all when you are picking a fertilizer you don’t want to in your garden center and pick up something like miracle grow. We don’t want to have the toxic chemicals particularly when we are spraying it on food plants. We personally don’t believe in supporting a company like Scott’s.

Phil: I am not a big fan of Scott’s.

H: Well, I am not a big fan of Scott’s even though they do some organic stuff, a lot of things like miracle grow fertilizers like this are big in macronutrients like NPK and is really interesting history of why conventional fertilizers focus on NPK but we want a more broad selection of nutrients, so we want trace minerals, micronutrients, all the other amazing things that fertilizer will do for us so.

Phil: We went to the garden center today and we were trying to, again we didn’t have ingredients on their fertilizer which is crazy, most I mean in North America, you are going to be able to read the ingredients, so you are gonna want to go for organic fertilizer but I am actually going to stir you away from going and buying just like a general purpose organic fertilizer.

H: What sort of fertilizers do you use?

Phil: Well my favorite is ocean water or if you don’t live by the ocean you can buy it a very concentrated low sodium chloride ocean water. It’s full of 80 plus trace minerals that have made their way into the ocean so it’s very good for getting broad spectrum nutrition, so if you need chromium in your life or molybdenum in your life you get into your soil onto your plants, eat those plants then you have nutrition. So it is that there is liquid [indiscernible 01:45] which is very similar, has lots of nutrients in it and then there is [indiscernible 01:50] growing up to us.

Nobody even know or tell me right now although, and there is like any kind of sugar molasses sugar, coca cola, all these things are great for us. Well, actually molasses is okay for us but the rest are not great for us they are actually just being onto your plants. So those are the main things I use. Now I am kind of health nut so you probably pretty much never drink coke.

I even had a coke for ever but if you have coke I don’t mind it as a fertilizer because it has sugar which feed the biology, feeds the microorganisms in the soil. It has phosphorus, it has carbon, so just I don’t know I have never figure out the ratio for containers but I would say mix it with 20 parts of water. So take a little bit of coke mix it with 20 times much water, water your plants with them and that’s going to provide a lot of food for the microbes which in turn are going to take that food and make available for plants.

Phil: Okay, it’s time to plant.

H: I’m planting the basil.

Phil: Okay.

H: Okay.

Phil: I will take the dill.

H: Nope.

Phil: The parsley?

H: You take the parsley.

Phil: Okay. We’ve already added our soil.

H: Yup.

Phil: I think we can use a little more. I would usually – and I fill it pretty full because it tends to – when you water it tends to sink a bit. Or you can you know, fill it as full as you want, then water it down and add some more. But you want to leave a bit of a lip at the top for future watering right?

H: Yeah.

Phil: I water before I plant, but you’ll do it the opposite.

H: I’m going to do the opposite.

Phil: You don’t want to get all muddy?

H: I don’t want to get dirty. Take the plant out of the pot. Sometimes you have to give it a little squeeze if it’s really root-bound and it should just slip right out, you know, try and make sure it stays in one piece as you do that. And if you find that the roots are really root-bound like they are now, you want to give it a little bit of a cut, preferably with a sharp non-serrated knife, but we don’t have that here. So we’re just going to use our fingers.

Phil: Yeah, and it’s not horribly root-bound but just enough that you want to break it up a little bit. Then what I would like to do is come through with my spray, oh yeah, which if it doesn’t work, so you have to be it.

H: Shsh – Great, great. Okay.

Phil: So, effective microorganisms going on here, the sea minerals, liquid kelp, every fertilizer is mixed in it with water, spray under the root system while you have the chance here. Spray it on the top too, could be after you plant.

H: Yeah.

Phil: And then we plant these things.

H: Okay.

Phil: You want the top of the root ball to be level with the top of your soil.

H: Yeah.

Phil: That’s another reason I kind of like to water first, really doesn’t matter much but then I know my soil have settled and then –

H: So when you get the plant in there, you’re going to take some of the soil from around and really tuck it up against the existing root ball.

Phil: People often don’t want to – they like the idea of there being lots of air around the root ball – sorry I got to get on camera, but what you really do want to do is take your fingers and make sure the soil comes right up to the roots because the roots need that soil. A baby could do it if their fingers were more agile.

H: If they were older –

Phil: Yeah.

H: Welcome to the office of redundancy office.

Phil: If you do any one thing, I would say water. Just make sure you are watering properly, which is not too much and not too little. I think so many problems, especially with indoor container plants is either over or under watering. So just stick your finger into the soil, see how wet it is down an inch down in there and then if it’s not wet enough, you water it and then you’re good to go. Water it.

H: Great. Now with herb pots, we can’t really generalize and say you should water once a week or three times a week because it’s going to entirely depend on the location of the plants, how much sun they’re getting, what type of pot they’re in, humidity in your house, these sorts of things.

Phil: Sometimes it will dry – on top and you’ll think you have to water, so if you put it down in there just a little bit, you’ll see if it’s wet inside. But we do want to dry out a little bit – just because if it stays wet all the time, there’s maybe not enough air in there or it’s easier for disease to kind of get hold. So if you let it dry it a little bit and then water.

H: As you get more used to looking at your plants, you’ll be able to develop a bit of a green thumb and maybe even tell by the leaves how they love to see if the plants need water.

Phil: Hopefully, it doesn’t get to the point where they are totally wet you know.

H: That’s true, yeah.

Phil: And that’s a bit –. So we have these containers, these little trays underneath the pot, I think you can probably see them and they are going to catch the water. You can certainly use your tap water but if you happen to have like rain water or – I actually got this water from a pond nearby, it’s going to be very – it’s going to have a lot of nutrition in it, a lot of microorganisms as long as it’s from a clean pond and it’s nice to do that instead of a chlorine water from a tap or if you can de-chlorinate it somehow, that’s just a bonus step, you don’t have to do that, but —

H: Make sure that the water is coming out of the drainage holes in the bottom of the pot, that way you know you’re really soaking the root ball. If the water isn’t coming out of the bottom of the pot, perhaps you need to give a little bit more.

Phil: I can see into your washroom from my washroom.

Phil: Pretty good number of bikes.

H: Thousands. You better remember to put a red ribbon on yours or else you’ll never find it. Why don’t you talk about controlling pests?

Phil: The main way we do that is just by preventing them. So all these things I talk about like using compost and rock dust and calcitic lime and sea ocean water, kelp fertilizer, molasses, effective microorganisms, anything we can do, even proper watering to create a healthy plant that’s going to cause pests to go elsewhere because pests only go after unhealthy plants. So mainly, that’s the thing I do, yeah.

H: Cool.

Phil: But I’m going to give you three different recipes today. Would you like some pancakes with your sugar? If you get some kind of soft body insect like Aphids or Whiteflies, things are common especially on – in containers inside because it’s such an unnatural environment. There is something you can make up. Actually, one of the first things I often do when I get that is come through with my effective microorganisms because again, sometimes that’s just boosting the plant off like that will help get rid of those.

But what you can do is you can make a homemade insecticide by taking a clove of garlic and crushing it into anything and then about a half-a-teaspoon of any kind of mineral oil or vegetable oil, stir them up really well and let that marinate for at least 24 hours, then to even make it more effective, you can put in some kind of insecticidal soap or just dish soap. As long as you have something that’s kind of clean and nontoxic like Dr. Bronner’s or – this is like a veggie wash soap.

So just a half-a-teaspoon of that, again, I don’t really, measure, it’s not that important. And then a quarter drop of water and that is ready to go. When you’re actually ready to spray, this can be mixed in another liter of water and you probably don’t need that much, so you can keep this for maybe a week or so if you want to keep it for awhile. But I’ll mix that in a liter of water, put it into a spray bottle and spray it onto the leaves on your plant.

IF you get any kind of disease like powdery mildew or some kind of wilt, something that can work really well is baking soda. So if you just put a teaspoon of baking soda and with a liter of water, I’m not going to put the whole liter in but – and spray that onto your plants and again the efficacy of this is improved if you used like half-a-teaspoon of soap. I think what the soap – soap is pesticidal but it also helps these things stick to the plant leaves so that it actually stays there for awhile. Something I often use instead of soap is molasses. It doesn’t have the pesticidal properties but it’s full of nutrition and carving to feed the beneficial microorganisms. So I often do that, plus it helps with the sticking. So that’s how you make that.

So the bottom-line is if you have healthy plants, they’re not going to get troubled by pests, so that’s why I’m always spraying these beneficial effective microorganisms, sea minerals, even molasses, coca-cola, whatever it is, that could help. Then you have this garlic thing, you can use if you really need it. You have this baking soda thing, you can use if you really need it. Always come after a day later with some beneficial biostimulants and effective microorganisms.

Phil: Now we’re talking about maintenance and harvesting of your plants. We just have a few quick tips. The first one is location. Make sure you put them for the most part herbs in your sunniest window and even during the warmer part of the year, if you have a balcony or if you can put them outside, that’s going to be better, more sun for them and more natural. So that’s going to be key for their health. Let’s just keep it on sunny.

H: Make sure when you have them in that place, you’re watering them. So we have a video about watering but yeah, make sure you water.

Phil: Oh yeah, you weren’t going to talk about location. Okay, do you want to start it again?

H: No, it’s okay. You did a good job.

Phil: Okay, so watering, number two and the big one. Third is to scum and spray weekly or monthly with whatever you decide to get. It could be effective microorganisms – I’ve said this a few times with effective microorganisms, some kind of organic fertilizer, even just spraying with molasses and mixed in water just to keep them healthy, keep them with nutrients.

H: Yup.

Phil: Your leave is opening up – that’s funny – and then you want to talk about harvesting, it’s a little backwards.

H: And then the last thing just to harvest —

Phil: I mean right now they look kind of funny right?

H: Yeah. Okay, so they’re a little bit small. We put this little mulch around it. Can they see that there?

Phil: I can point the camera down a little bit.

H: Yeah, alright. So we put this little mulch around it, now the plants are looking quite small but my dilly, they really puff up and totally fill up the pot.

Phil: Yeah, within a month or two they’ll be big.

H: Yeah. And then what you’re going to do is just harvest the herbs or whatever you’re growing whenever you’re ready. So take your snips, just go down to the stem there, snip it and —

Phil: Pretty easy.

H: Umm, that’s really good.

Phil: You can start harvesting right away, but really like in a month, then you can harvest everyday and you won’t be using the whole plant.

H: Right, exactly.

Phil: That’s why herbs are nice.

H: Yeah.

Phil: So we did it.

H: Yeah.

Phil: Okay.

H: Cut –. Right in front here, is the Concert hall. They have symphonies, operas, that kind of big show there. Directly in front of us is the Van Gogh Museum and it’s just reopened, began after a little bit of construction, beautiful – museum and that is also a beautiful big museum, many exhibitions, many halls, you could spend a day in there.

H: Let’s do this.

Phil: Okay.

H: You look tall.

Phil: I know. That’s what I said the other day. So I think it’s been about nine days or so since we planted these and if you take a look, you can see they’re growing already and it’s kind of happening how you would think it would happen. The parsley seems to take longer to get going, same when you’re starting parsley from a seed, it takes a long time to germinate. But the basil is coming up nicely and the dill is coming up nicely. And there are just a couple of quick things I want to talk about here in this conclusion. First is a quick summary of what we did.

So, if I can remember, we want to get containers that have drainage and that are made from nontoxic materials, we want to get potting mix that is organic and hopefully have some good compost in it otherwise you can bring in some worm compost or some kind of nice organic compost. We want to get some plants that are organic if possible, but if not, that’s fine, you can just go buy some plants. Then, we want to think about microbial inoculants such as effective microorganisms and organic fertilizers — I guess I don’t have any props, such as sea minerals or liquid kelp or molasses and then we want to put all of these things together into a pot; green side up and then we just want to make sure we water very well, keep them healthy so they don’t get pest problems and then we can start harvesting fairly quickly. We’ve already been harvesting some of these things and that’s all, right? That’s what we talked about.

H: Yeah.

Phil: Good. Second, if you’re on my blog and you’ve actually made it to the bottom of this blog post and you’re watching this video, that means you’ve made through all of this. Ask any questions below or if you’re on Facebook, ask any questions, if you’re on YouTube, ask any questions, make sure you’ll like the page on Facebook or subscribe on YouTube because we’re going to do more videos like this in the future and that’s all. That’s the conclusion.

H: —

Phil: No, you already did that joke –

H: What?

Phil: You haven’t seen that video yet.

H: Great.

Phil: Oh, I’m leaving Amsterdam in two days.

H: Aw..

Phil: But you’re coming a few days later –

H: Yes.

Phil: And we might shoot some videos – you don’t know this yet, but we might shoot some videos back home.

H: I’ll check the contract first.

Phil: Okay. Cut it.