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Basic Landscaping Ideas
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Basic Landscaping Ideas

If you live in urban areas where there aren’t much space to work with, you can still grow your favorite vegetables in a vertical garden. You can easily create one using hanging baskets, shelves, and trellis, as well as a bit of your imagination.

You can design a functional vertical system or a more architectural look to your garden. It’s entirely up to you. Be inspired and don’t be afraid to try different things!

The benefits of growing a vertical garden using a trellis:

  • Save space. You can produce MORE vegetables with LESS space.
  • Its easy to grow. Keeping the vegetables of the ground will prevent insects and other pests from crawling in your plants. It also reduced risk of plant disease.
  • Easy to harvest. You don’t have to bend down to care and maintain your vegetables. Since the plants are at eye level, you can easily harvest the vegetables.
  • It looks nice! Vertical gardens can create a whole different dimension to your landscape.
  • Provide shade for other plants. You can grow other vegetables or herbs beneath the trellis.
  • Hides unattractive parts of your garden. I have a crack in my wall so I decided to cover it up with a green beans plant.
  • Better air circulation.

Vertical Garden Ideas

With a little planning and a vision, you can grow a vegetable vertical garden anywhere, even with limited horizontal space.

A vertical garden could also be referred to as “green wall, ” ranging from the basic simple backyard designs to the more recently innovative hydroponics technology.

In this article, we will focus on the basic design for a beginners gardener. You can be creative and utilize many different props to support your garden.

  • The basic trellis can be used as a support system for trailing or vine crops. If you place a trellis against the wall, make sure there is space between the wall and the trellis to allow air circulation and also for the vines to grow.
  • Rigid livestock panels do double duty as a fence and support for tomatoes, plus they can be bent to create an arched entry.
  • aplings or bamboo poles are easy to use for pole beans. The upside to using bamboo tipis is that they give you more flexibility with what you want to plant. They are considered temporary trellis, and needs to be taken down and stored during the winter months to prevent from rotting.
  • Using sturdy poles is another way to take advantage of vertical space while making support system for green beans and other vegetables that love to climb.
  • You can also tie thick biodegradable ropes to train the vines to climb wherever you want it to. Tendrils from green beans cling to horizontal and vertical parts of a trellis. You build it and it will come. By using biodegradable materials, you can cut down the trellis and pull out the plants at the same time, then throw it all on the compost pile.

In my vertical garden, most of plants are grown using trellises and wire cages. For example, my dad and I built a trellis to serve as a “roof” of an area. I wanted the vines and leaves of my gourd plants to crawl on top so the actual fruits can hang down vertically, creating a beautiful sight. Originally it was meant for the grapes vine. However the first year my grapes didn’t produce so we planted the gourd plant instead. The next summer, I figured how to grow grapes so we provided another trellis for the opposite side of the garden.

How To Build a Garden Trellis

It’s very easy to build your own trellis or frame. However if you don’t have the time or just don’t feel like doing it yourself, you can buy them at most stores such as Home Depot or Lowe’s.

If you have vegetables such as gourd or fruits with vines such as grapes, you can build a simple “trellis roof.” This project is really easy to do.

  1. You’re going to need four strong wooden poles that will become its foundation, holding up the roof. The rectangular sticks will need to be strong enough to support the roof trellis and the plants.
  2. Cut the wooden poles into thinner poles. Since we had a fairly small amount of space, we cut about 25 of them.
  3. Next, you’re going to need a hammer and some strong 2 inch nails to secure the poles. And voila! You have built yourself a trellis!

The reason why you would want multiple thinner pole instead of one large slab of wooden material is to allow the vines to weave itself through freely, and for the gourd to hang down.

Also, since we wanted to grow other vegetables underneath, it allows the sunlight to shine through. There are jalapenos, eggplants, a lot of herbs underneath! Now this is what it really means to grow a lot of produce without using excessive space! The shade created by the trellis and vines can benefit the other plants growing underneath.

Tomatoes Prefer to Grow Vertically on Cages

Tomatoes like to throw themselves over their support. They must be trained and tied to an upright trellis, which isn’t as easy as growing them in wire cages. The larger, more robust the tomato plant, the more you need a sturdy tomato cage that provides support on all sides.

Woven-wire tomato cages contain their exuberance reasonably well, and make the ripe fruits easier to find.

Even the best tomato cages become top-heavy when the plants are in full fruit, so they should be well-anchored to deeply set stakes.

 

Source: dengarden.com