Not everyone is lucky enough to have a garden. Potted plants allow you to bring nature into your home, but also to extend the pleasure on a balcony or even a terrace. In pots, plants are far from their natural growing conditions, the difficulty being to recreate them and to ensure the necessary contributions to their survival
A reasoned choice
The plant coveted in the garden center must correspond to the conditions of luminosity, heat and hygrometry of its future location. This way you will have more chances on your side for the success of its culture in pot. For example, it is useless to grow cacti in a dark and cool apartment or fuchsias in full sun on a south-facing terrace. The choice of the plant is thus crucial for the future success.
A suitable substrate
Growing in a pot means knowing the exact needs of each plant in order to choose the right substrate. A plant installed in the garden will have a huge amount of soil at its disposal, it can spread its roots as it pleases, deep or on the surface to find the necessary nutrients. This is not the case for our potted subject, which will depend on the quantity and quality of the substrate offered in a more or less narrow container. The key word is always the same: adaptation to the needs!
Always ask about the needs of the plant and compose its substrate according to its needs: very light by adding sand, very fertile based on potting soil and organic amendments, neutral, acid, limestone ... The same goes for the container: plants with taproots will need a very deep pot, while those with weak development will be satisfied with a half pot.
Controlled watering
Potted plants must always be watered more than the same species in the ground. Evaporation is much more important under these growing conditions, especially in the case of potted plants installed on a terrace sheltered from rainfall but exposed to full sun and drying winds. The roots are very quickly dry and surrounded by a container that heats up quickly, without regular watering the catastrophe will happen very quickly.
In apartments, watering should also be adapted. First of all to the cultivated variety, but also to the exposure and the heating method. The dry air emitted by electric heaters is harmful to most of the so-called "green" plants, which are often tropical plants that appreciate a high level of humidity. To compensate for the lack of humidity, you can install the greediest plants on large plates filled with clay balls that are kept constantly moist and baste their foliage twice a week. Be careful, however, never to leave stagnant water in the saucers after watering, as this could cause your plant to rot very quickly due to asphyxiation of the roots.
A regular supply of nutrients
As we have seen, potted plants quickly exhaust the few reserves present in the soil. To make up for this lack, there is nothing like a regular addition of adapted fertilizer during the growth period. For green plants, a fertilizer rich in nitrogen (N) is preferable, while for flowering plants the dose of potassium (K) and phosphorus (P) is more important. Always look at the N-P-K ratio on the package.
