Our Veggie garden...in pots

Happy Easter Everyone! I hope everyone took some time with family and friends to enjoy the gorgeous day. Hubby and I took off on Friday (hence no post) to get some work done on the house. More about that during the week. I will tell you guys about one thing we got started this weekend...our veggie garden!
You may not remember but last year we attempted our first raised bed garden.

The raised beds were perfect. James (our pup) avoided them, the soil maintained water better and we had enough room for all of our plants. There was one problem: we planted in a shady spot. In fact, our whole house has a lot of shady lawn areas so we knew this year was going to be tricky. I did some research and we realized that the best place to grow vegetables would be in pots on our deck.

Don't judge our deck decor. We haven't pulled out the rug, cushions and pillows yet. I am a little behind.

We chose the deck because it gets the most sun throughout the day without trees blocking the rays and if it ever got shady we could move the pots to another location. It seems like a win/win. So what did we plant?

After some research from here and here we decided that the pot on the left would hold one heirloom tomato plant and the larger green pot would hold two cherry tomato plants. Tomato plants need room for their roots so I recommend at least a 5 gallon pot or bigger. We also decided to plant some romaine lettuce. We were going to plant seeds but the more mature plants were on sale so we went with them. Lettuce can grow in shallow pots so we went with some window boxes that were left over from the previous owners. Waste not, want not right?

Make sure that whatever you plant you veggies in has holes for drainage. We also used a mix of potting soil and fertilizer when we planted our garden. Research also encourages a compost mix but we don't have a compost pile.

Since there was also a sale on strawberry plants so we decided to take a chance and try to grow some of those delicious treats. We hung them on one of our hanging baskets on the deck.

I will keep you guys up to date on how our potted garden works out. As the month goes on we plan on trying to plant squash as well.  I really think that as long as we water the pots more often and make sure they get the right amount of sun, we might have a successful veggie garden.

So who else planted a veggie garden already? Nothing beats fresh tomatoes all summer long. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.