With both climate change and economic hardship, the best plants to grow in your garden would be a combination of fruits, herbs, vegetables, and flowers. You can grow some of each variety in small spaces such as pots, half-wine barrels, and troughs. Before you start planting your assortment in your garden, you must make sure it is healthy, this means getting rid of weeds with a weed eater and trimming the lawn with a mower. Once you have set the scene, you can then look at planting everything you need to.
Best Plants To Grow in a Garden
You can grow specific flowers to help in the pollination process and to attract natural pollinators back to our gardens: bees, butterflies, ladybirds, and an assortment of different insects. A good guide is to have plants growing that are suited to each season in your climate from each of the above categories. An excellent website guide for herbs and vegetables is Gardenate.
Dwarf Fruit Trees
Dwarf fruit trees can be grown in half-wine barrels. These include different varieties of dwarf apple and stone fruits. Give them good healthy soil including compost and mulch them to help keep the soil temperature even. Excellent plants for pots are citrus: lemons, oranges, limes, mandarins, cumquats, and dwarf grapefruits.
You can also grow smaller fruits in pots of no less than 25-liter capacity. These include berries: strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and many more. Be careful though, the Berries have specific needs and will flourish if they are met. Rhubarb and melons can be grown in pots.
To attract natural pollinators to your garden you can plant smaller flower varieties such as Salvias, nasturtium, and calendula in or near the same pots as melons.
Growing Herbs
Herbs are happy plants that are easy to care for. Choose what you would use most. If you love to make pizza and fresh tomato sauces, the following herbs are easy to grow: marjoram, oregano, basil, and parsley. If you’d like to brew your mint tea, try peppermint. The mint family can be rather rampant, so grow it in pots.
Staple Crops
Tomatoes are a good basic crop and if planted every few weeks it will prolong the harvest season. Search for bush tomatoes to grow in pots; Roma tomatoes are an example. If growing tomatoes in cooler areas raise them off the cold ground or shelter them in a greenhouse. Potatoes, carrots, and pumpkins are great staple crops. It depends on how much room you have as to the varieties and amount of veggies you would like to grow.
Now, what garden is complete without flowers somewhere, tucked into a corner, sprouting through pavement cracks and producing their bright cheery faces to freshen a new day? The brightest flower face is the sunflower. It comes in different shades of yellow through to bronze shades and is easy to grow from seed.
Cosmos is a popular favorite and tolerates a variety of conditions. It is a faithful flowerer in shades of white and multiple pinks from pale to deep cerise. Calendula is a constant flowerer and the bees love it. If you are looking for low-growing flowers that self-seed then you want alyssum ground-hugging plants. Zinnias are bright and cheery and love the warmth of summer.
Winter-Spring Flowers
For winter-spring flowering, there are the faithful daffodils, jonquils, bluebells, crocus, hyacinth, and freesias. Roses are beautiful plants and are loved by many. They are especially popular with florists for Valentine’s Day and special occasions.
Be sure to not overlook the native wildflowers in your area. One of the longest flowering, especially in dry hot summers is the strawflower. You can use the Strawflower in dry flower arrangements when their season has passed. The numerous lavenders are magnificent in their flower production and are hardy and tolerant of many different conditions and climates, including coastal areas.
There are just so many plants to grow. The best idea is to talk to your local garden center and with neighbors and people from your local area to hear what works and doesn’t work so well. Plants are beautiful in all their different shapes and forms.
Enjoy them, nurture them and you’ll be richer for the experience of choosing and growing plants in your blossoming garden.
Make sure to check out our other Gardening Posts!