Vertical Gardening

If you can’t go out – you go up and that’s where we get “vertical gardening”.

The advantage is that most of us have almost unlimited amounts of “up” even when we don’t have much in the way of “out”. So think vertical and here are a few tips to get you started.

Vegetables

Get used to building staking systems of some kind so you can grow a great many vegetable crops upwards. From tomatoes to pole beans to squash, pumpkins and watermelon – if it has a long stem you can make it go up.

This video shows an easy way to make your own support structure for any kind of crop 

Vines

There are all manner of vining crops you can use to garden and cover up the sides of buildings and virtually any other surface. Here’s a link to the area of my sites where I talk about growing

Fruit

There’s absolutely no reason at all why you can’t vertically garden with fruit. We call espalier and it’s pretty much a case of pruning the fruit trees in a flat, ladder shaped system up the side of a building or along wires.

Support Structures

The one tip I will leave you with is that you overbuild your support structures.  You’ll be surprised how heavy a plant can become by the end of the growing season.

I hope this gives you some sense of how you can extend your gardening by using vertical gardening techniques.

The plants grow the same, require the same levels of water and nutrients – it’s all in your imagination about how you get them to go upwards instead of out. Have fun.