Maybe your first thought on starting a container vegetable garden was “I can grow tomatoes!” Which is great—but tomatoes are a summer crop and it’s not time to put them outside yet. You can start your garden even earlier, though, with spring plantings.

Here are a few of the spring crops you can grow in containers:

• Lettuce and other salad greens
• Asian greens like bok choy and komatsuna
• Other smaller brassicas like kale and collards
• Peas
• Root crops like beets, radishes, and carrots
• Potatoes
• Many herbs

The only spring crops I would hesitate to grow in containers are large brassicas like cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, and even those could be planted in containers—it’s just that you would only plant one per pot, which might not be worth the effort, unless you have space for a lot of pots, no in-ground garden, and a real love of fresh-grown cabbage.

I’m also not a huge fan of potatoes in containers, because they don’t usually produce very much and it doesn’t seem worth the space and expense when potatoes are so cheap to buy. Nevertheless, I’m going to give it another try this year, just so I can report back here!

Here are some tips on planting spring crops in containers:

• In some cases it may be more practical to start with transplants rather than planting from seed. This allows you to get the spacing just right and eliminates tedious thinning of extra seedlings. It’s also much faster. But seeding also works fine.
• Consider the shape of the container when choosing a crop (or vice versa). Crops you want to harvest a lot of, like lettuce or radishes, will work better in a wider container. They also have shallow root systems, so the container doesn’t have to be very deep. Whereas if you’re going to grow carrots, make sure you have a container several inches deeper than the expected carrot length.
• The usual container growing guidelines apply: use lightweight potting mix rather than real soil from the ground; water frequently; apply fertilizer as needed.

Here are some photos of spring crops growing in containers:

Photo collage from left (click image to enlarge): peas in a fabric grow bag (a great inexpensive option for lots of crops); chives in a rectangular planter (herbs are wonderful container crops); lettuce, arugula and chard in a raised trough planter on my deck; various spring greens in a keyhole garden, which has an area in the middle meant for creating compost to feed the plants. Except for the trough planter, all of these are from the Special Projects area at the Derwood Demo Garden.

This does bring up a question: what counts as a container? The raised keyhole garden and raised trough planter in the photos are much larger than the typical pot or planter, and may be closer to a raised bed. There’s certainly a fuzzy line between the two types of gardening.

To my mind, a container is an object that holds growing medium more likely to be potting soil than real mineral soil from the ground, and that could sit on a deck, patio, or driveway rather than being situated in a typical vegetable garden layout. I definitely consider my trough planter to be a container, if a very large one. The keyhole garden is an edge case, maybe more of a raised bed the way we use it at the Derwood Demo Garden in Montgomery County, Maryland. But it could be a patio planter, so I’m happy to regard it as a container as well.

In any case, it’s time to get those spring crops growing if you haven’t already! Happy spring!

By Erica Smith, Montgomery County Master Gardener. Read more posts by Erica.

Related information:

Growing Vegetables in Containers and Salad Tables