The potted plants can be enjoyed outdoors for the spring, summer, and early fall, and can be wintered over in a cool basement or garage. Many of your favorite vegetables can be grown in containers, including tomatoes, peppers, carrots, beets, lettuce, spinach, squash, cucumbers and onions. For the most part you can plant the same varieties that you'd plant in the garden but there are also compact varieties specially bred for container growing. Be aware that in some cases, varieties bred for compactness may not be as flavorful as standard varieties. That's because compact plants have fewer leaves and sugar production happens in the leaves.
Salad greens are very easy to grow in containers.
Try combining several greens in one pot for a ready-made salad mixture. Simply mix together the seed of lettuces, chervil, arugula, endive, herbs, radicchio or other greens and sow them in a wide shallow container. Snip off the leaves when they are very young and tender. Since you can expect about 4 harvests from every planting, reseed a new container every few weeks for a continuous harvest. Most herbs thrive in containers.