A few rules of container gardening

This is my second season container gardening and I wanted to share a few tips.

1. Container gardening is inherently temporary in nature and movability will give you some nice options as the weather and seasons change. You shouldn't use anything that you can't easily move. This means you shouldn't buy a 4' x 2' tree bed and put it on your fire escape, fill it with rocks, 100lbs of soil, and a tree. I have now spent about 10 hours of my precious weekends trying to get this thing off our "balcony" and have made little headroom. The previous owner put it out there and we had to take it down because the insurance company says so. I don't disagree with the insurance company, the thing weighs a few hundred pounds.

2. Know your window boxes because they're all different. I have window boxes on two sides of the apartment and they are all different. Most of them get little rain and lots of wind, two of them get no wind, lots of rain, and some sunlight. One of them gets no rain, all sun, and tons of wind. I put up a post about the fate of my pansies a while ago that illustrated the point nicely. You need to choose plants that are appropriate to the conditions. This is obvious to a real gardener, you know, with land, but less obvious to me. I also had to choose plants based on how easy it was for me to water the plants. I can't water the plants in our bedroom in the morning because my husband is asleep so those need to be self sufficient. I can't water the ones in my office because that window is broken and I can water the ones in the living room because no one sleeps there and the window isn't broken. So your window boxes become a reflection of the microclimates of your house and must be delicately maintained so as to not ruin your marriage.