Permaculture in pots

So ever since the permaculture seminar a couple weeks ago I have been curious about any way in which I could apply it to my container garden at home. My biggest problem at home is keeping the soil wet enough. Often I find that I water my plants and within 2 days the pot is bone dry. It's even worse with small pots and herbs.

After reading many pages of my organic gardening book I thought that maybe I could use mulch of some sort in order to help keep the moisture in the pot. Unfortunately the problem with that is that I don't have access to mulch of any sort and even my worm compost will dry up and lose most of its nutrients when I use it. Some mulch replacements that have been mentioned are dry dead leaves, it's a little late to collect those and even is I did I wouldn't have a good place to store them until the spring when I need them most, and shredded paper, which while easy to collect and store is hard to keep on the plants and doesn't look particularly good (especially in indoor pots... Tried it, didn't like it).

So this brings me back to permaculture and the seminar a couple of weeks ago. One of the things that was mentioned was that leaving the ground covered with a natural ground cover works really well at protecting the soil... So here is my question to people, can I add a low lying ground cover to my pots to help retain water? I think that is should be possible my only concern is that the ground over will compete for the resources already kind of scare in the pot. I also want to make sure that the roots of the ground cover don't grow in too deep or they may start crowding out my plants roots. I think the ideal ground cover would be some kind of grass that I could cut back thereby adding material to mulch with a root system that doesn't extend more than say 2cm? Anyone know of a type of grass like that? Oh one more thing to consider is that Talia is allergic to a lot of grasses and weeks so it has to be Talia friendly.