Bedding Plant

If you are in a more urban area like a city, or a locale where home vegetable gardening is not as popular as in the country, it will mean a flower start.

Gardening can be a bit confusing in the beginning, but once you learn some of the lingo, your garden shopping will be a breeze.

What to Look For

For most of gardeners, it’s fairly easy to tell when a plant is overgrown and past its prime.

Long and leggy is no way to start. By the same token, a bedding plant that is barely coming out of the soil can be just as bad.

A good percentage of bedding plants are sold in six packs. A six pack is a container with six individual cells, containing six small plants.

If you are buying in the six packs, your plants should not be much taller than the container that they are in.

But on the other foot, if you are worried that the plants are too immature, take your hand and hold it above the six packs of plants.

Spread your fingers wide, and check to see if you can see the soil that the plants are in. If you can see more soil than plants, they are too immature.

The root structure will not have fully developed and your chance of a successful planting is severely diminished. Whether vegetable or flower, these are good rules of thumb to follow.

Growing in Containers vs. the Ground

Container gardening is becoming more and more popular these days, mostly because it’s easier to control the environment that you are placing your plant in.

The ground can be hard, too heavy and if you haven’t lived there a number of years, without having it tested; you simply don’t know what is in your soil.

You can grow any bedding plants in a container; you just have to pick the right one for your plant’s needs. For example, if you are planting a petunia, a pot that is about six inches deep should work out just fine.

It you are growing a tomato plant though, you really want to choose something that has a depth of at least twelve to eighteen inches in order to accommodate the root structure.

The bottom line is that by choosing a healthy bedding plant you are one step close to gardening success. And a successful gardener is a happy one!

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