Good Vegetable Varieties for Container Culture

By C Rae Hozer, Cumberland County Master Gardener

My front walk gets sun but most of our property is shady after trees leaf out in the spring. Typically pots filled with flowers decorate that entrance. This year it is the site of my containerized kitchen garden. Pots of every size, shape and color are filled with herbs and veggies. Three potato-gardens-in-a-sack and two upside-down tomato plants grow there.

Fortunately, I had containers set up before the rains poured down. After two weeks of rain, I couldn’t work in my tiny vegetable plot out by the road. Warm-season transplants were waiting for our frost-free date to be set out. That day passed, but the garden soil was very soggy. 

Talk of rain brings up a good point—drainage and watering can be issues with containers. When rain is sparse, pot-grown plants require more watering than garden-grown ones. However, too much water can be a killer. Good drainage is a must. I reused older decorative pots, recycled some 2 gallon plastic paint pails, even recruited an empty 5 gallon container kitty litter was sold in. Use a 3/4-inch bit and cordless drill to add drain holes to plastic containers.

Because overheated roots aren’t healthy for plants use light-colored pots. Dark colors absorb more heat from the sun whereas light colored containers reflect heat Wood insulates best.

Annette Wszelaki, University of Tennessee Vegetable Specialist, provided information on vegetable varieties to use in containers or small gardens and appropriate pot sizes. Another resource was Creating Colorful Containers by Beth Babbit, Urban Horticulture Specialist for  UT Extension. That publication suggests both veggies and herbs for container growing.

Want to raise tomatoes? Pruning off extra leaves encourages more and sweeter fruit. Mel Bartholomew’s vegetable growing book Square Foot Gardening describes tomato pruning as do other publications. Drawings to illustrate the technique are helpful for first-timers. Bush type tomatoes are determinate (D). They produce mature tomatoes on shorter plants over fewer weeks. Vine-type tomato plants are Indeterminate (I). They produce fruit until frost, grow tall and need a trellis or stake for support. Minimum container sizes are 1 gallon (small, cherry or grape type fruit) and 5 gallons (larger tomatoes). At this point, I’d buy transplants rather than starting with seed. Tomatoes take 55-100 days from seed to harvest.

Slicing varieties: Bush Early Girl (D), BushSteak Hybrid (D, Shepherd’s), Spring Giant, Better Boy (I), Jetstar (I), Bush Celebrity (D less than 20 inches high), and Super Bush (D, Shepherd’s).  Roma tomato: Saladette (D). Cherry tomatoes: Golden Nugget D, Shepherd’s), Patio F Hybrid (D), Patio Princess (D, Burpee), Pixie (D), Small Fry (D, All-America Selections winner), Sun Gold,  Super Sweet 100 (I, Burpee), Sweet 100 (I), Tiny Tim (D), Tommy Toe (I, Australian heirloom) and Totem (D). Grape tomatoes: Golden sunshine (D, yellow-orange grape tomatoes), and Sun Gold (I, orange, sweet fruit).

Potatoes- My container-grown potatoes really took off once we got warm weather and rain. Someone questioned my earlier comment about adding soil to get a good yield from just a few potato plants. When the plants in my wooden half barrel grow 4 or 5 inches high, I add enough additional soil to raise the surface up 2 or 3 inches. (Plant tops/leaves are still at least 2 inches above the soil line.) I usually do this a couple times in the spring. For each potato-garden-in-a-sack I recycled empty white, woven plastic burlap, compost bags. Roll sack tops down around the outside so they can be unfolded as you make the soil deeper.

5/12/2009