    My container garden is growing well. The squash, cucumbers, green peppers and tomatoes are growing all over the place. The flowers aren't doing bad either. Here are a few hints to help with your container garden.
Make sure your container is big enough. At some point you may end up replanting if you didn't pick a container large enough to begin with. This could creat a problem since some vegetables and flowers do not transplant well. Always make sure your containers have drain holes, or your plants could drown.
I drilled drain holes in the bottom of the containers I used, and then propped one end up with a brick. This worked really well because they drained good, and propping them up toward the morning sun encouraged them to grow even more.
I make my own mixture to ward off pests and help nourish the soil. It really is very simple. I save my coffee grounds and let them dry. I save all of my eggshells, wash them, let them dry and them grind them up and mix them with the coffee grounds. Mixing this in the soil does two things. The coffee grounds drive away a lot of pests, and the eggshells help nourish the soil.
Collect rain water in containers to water your garden whenever you can. Rain water has many more nutirents your plants need than the water supplied by your town or city. The rural water is treated with many filtering processes and chemicals to clean it for reuse, thus removing a lot of the nutrients your plants need.
Make your own compost pile out of dead leaves, clippings from your plants, leftovers from the kitchen, such as cucumber and carrot peels, lettuce and cabbage leaves and pepper tops, brown manure and grass clippings. You can put this in a pile not far from the garden, wet it down, cover it up and let it cook in the sun. If you keep the compost pile going all summer, you just need to walk over and take from it to feed your garden at weekly or bi-weekly intervals.
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