A Complete Guide to Vertical Gardening (On A Budget!) | Growing Food Made Simple

Hello my beautiful friends and welcome back to Roots and Refuge Farm. Today I want to talk to you about why

vertical

gardening

makes sense and how easy it really is. If you do a quick online search on

vertical

gardening

, it will come up again. with lots of really cute ideas such as planters suspended on a wall or gutters built on a step structure, all sorts of really cool ideas for

growing

plants upwards, however if

growing

a garden for production is what you have in mind, the small pots are not. It's really going to be what you're looking for.

I found and in a lot of my research, when I was looking for information and inspiration on vertical gardening, when it came to edibles, there really wasn't much out there, so what exactly is Hartlepool? Gardening is pretty much curling things up, it doesn't have to be fancy, it's just making things grow rather than letting them wander around on the ground, so the first big question when doing that would be why would you want to train your

food

to grow well, there are some very good reasons, first the space, I mean the footprint of this squash plant, if it were grown wandering in the ground, would be approximately 20 square feet, you would have to allocate that space in your garden for that one plant. however, by growing it up and over this arched trellis, it shares a bed space with this pineapple ground cherry with these cherry tomatoes on this side, which although it is a seed, a plant of this, is planted in this corner of this side where it is. growing down there are more plants, tomatoes and another ground cherry, some herbs and now this plan is growing over this walkway so the footprint is reduced from 20 square feet to almost nothing, I mean it's literally a lot, just a few square feet in both. sides where the trellises are and other than that it just covers the path adding beauty to the garden.

The second benefit of vertical gardening is how easy it makes harvesting and for example these cucumbers are here at waist height so I can just stand here and pick them, picking things when it's upright is a lot easier for your back and your knees. This is much easier than crawling on the ground looking for your fruit under all the leaves and placing your

food

right in front of it. so you are not as likely to miss out on the fruits. I don't know about you, but I know that even with a vertical garden I'm sometimes surprised by a huge cucumber or something that I

complete

ly missed, but I know that when I was growing things in the ground I was surprised much more often by fruits that had been hidden underneath of the foliage.

The third benefit of vertical gardening is that it produces much healthier plants, as long as you put them on a trellis, they won't be sitting there in the dirt and they don't get splashes from watering and rain on the leaves, therefore they don't stay wet, Wet foliage and plants get dirty like that, that's a huge recipe for bacterial and fungal infections, pests, wilting, and fruit hanging. off the ground, it's out of reach of little critters that would like to come and eat it before you get the chance. The final benefit of vertical gardening is that it is beautiful, adds line and structure to your garden design and at the same time is

complete

ly functional, displaying your food so you can go out and enjoy it as it grows and creating spaces that are simply interesting and attractive, as well as very productive, so we can agree that vertical gardening is definitely functional, it is definitely aesthetically pleasing, but is it economical?

Well, as with most things, it really depends on how you do it. There will be different types of trellises for all different types of price ranges. Now I really don't think it's necessary to go to a home center and buy. trellises that are marketed to gardeners for the purpose of trellising. I just don't think it's feasible. I don't think it's functional, but you don't need to take my word for it. Let's see exactly how expensive it can be to purchase vertical trellises. I chose to check prices at Home Depot, this is where I come and buy things when I need them for my home.

Obviously things would be even more expensive if you went to something like a specialty garden center, when I thought this would be a good place to look and find what the lowest price would be for something like this. Here we have some decorative trellises, the 72-inch one, which is $35.98. Oh yes, 3498 on this 80 inch trellis. These hooks here cost 1278 each. Here only these. regular like a potting trellis for $10 a fan trellis for 15 obviously if you decide to go that route things would add up very quickly if you were growing much of anything because you know one of those 80 inch trellises It could probably be handled like a cucumber plant, so if you're thinking about doing any kind of canning or if you're supporting a large family in your garden, it just won't be feasible at all to get trellises for that scale of production I'm looking for. for fencing, if you're on someone with full vacuum strength dancers, I can't find it, I found it, I was on the wrong side of history, so now let's talk about what else you could use instead of buying packaged trellises for the purpose of trellising plants now I understand that some people may have a completely different goal for me, maybe they want a really nice garden where everything is elegant, it may be beneficial for them to have some type of trellis that is very elaborate or decorative.

You think that's beautiful, however, in the case of my garden, for me it was a question of how to make it as functional and productive as possible while keeping the price as low as possible and then, within that, make it beautiful, really quickly. Let's look at some of these fencing materials they have here at Home Depot. Another reason I came here is because they are more available price-wise, whereas if I go to my local farmers cooperative. They may have a really good deal, but it's not available to most of you, so here we have a row of 50 feet of welded wire for $35, which is 50 feet for $35 at 600 inches, so pretty much is the same price as 80. inches of vertical trellis spacing, if you purchase a pre-

made

trellis that is packaged for you for the purpose of trellising plants, you can get 600 inches of a material that everything I have grown would climb very well on this, now you have to unroll it.

If you have to cut it, you have to hold it to something so that it is upright. We have typically used T posts for this. They cost three to five dollars each, depending on how tall they are here. Our T posts down here we have a 5 foot of posts for 4 dollars six foot T post 4 4 448 obviously these are really affordable options here is a 6 foot steel T post for 378 hair chicken wire now chicken wire will not hold up as long as these welded wire fencing materials or livestock panels, which are my favorite things to use for trellises, but I am trying to show some other options as I know not everyone has them available, but this is like a PVC coated green poultry net with coated chicken wire. $20 for a 25 foot roll, it's 2 feet wide, you could just take all kinds of frames and put the chicken wire on and create a kind of trellis, you could take an old bed frame, you could take an old window frame , could take a platform. and knock down some of the center boards and just staple some chicken wire and shore it up.

What you're trying to create is just some sort of sturdy framework for your plants to hold onto and grow. Now my preferred route is obviously cattle panels, which we call cattle panels, they come in 18 foot pieces, this is what we just did. You haven't seen our video, you can watch it. I'll put the link in the bio. you can cut them, we use bolt cutters to cut them and configure them in different ways, they could be sold as hog panels, cattle panels, but if you call any type of farm supply store or tractor store, something like that and describe this is what you are looking for: cattle panels, pig panels, they will know what you are talking about, they are only about 20-25 dollars each.

Some people have told me in your area that they cost over $30 even with that being the case, it's cheaper than buying pre-

made

trellises sold for landscaping, but let's say you don't have the

budget

to go out and buy livestock panels, that It doesn't mean that vertical gardening is out of reach. A question for you: There are many ways you can create trellises on a

budget

using found materials. A good way to get materials if you can't afford to buy them is to find out if anyone in your area has any fences they no longer want. gates, fences, fence posts, all that stuff, a lot of times people are looking to get rid of stuff like that, but they just need someone to take it down or come take it down, yeah that's a little bit of work, but it does save you a lot of money , is it worth this trellis that we have tomatoes growing on right now it's just a 6 foot piece of fence that we unrolled and attached to some tea posts, they are all mixed heights and we are going to grow tomatoes on this two piece of a cage for dogs that someone gave us because the door was broken, the ones that were put back are kind of garbage for a while and I finally brought it here and I'm growing pumpkins here there is a door.

I'm pretty sure someone gave this to us because he said, "You know, we're about to put this on the side of the road." We replaced our fence and thought maybe something could be done with it, so we picked it up and used zip ties. to connect all of this together, these are all materials that are affordable, they're pretty easy to put together, it doesn't take a lot of carpentry skills to put up an exit post and attach, you know, a gate or a piece of metal fence to that. t-post with flanges, but let's say you're not in a place where you can get those things, let's say you don't have a truck or you don't have the ability to move the maneuver these big panels yourself.

Before I had this garden, before I had all these trellises, I grew peas and beans, I pulled beans and climbing peas just by putting some tea poles in the ground and running a clothesline between them, this gave the peas and beans something to climb. It worked out great at the end of the season. I had to remove it, whereas these things you put them in and you could leave them for years if you wanted. So what can you grow beans vertically? These particular ones are called noodle beans. any type of climbing beans, you don't even have to convince them, just plant them at the base of a trellis like this and they do the rest.

This is especially beneficial if you don't have a large garden and don't have the space to grow a large number of bush beans or row beans, you can grow many more beans on a pole plant than on a bush bean plant because, essentially, when It's about beans, a pole bean is the equivalent of an indeterminate tomato, while a bush bean is the equivalent of a determinate variety, it means that as long as you continue to support them and keep those plants healthy, they will continue to produce flowers and therefore produce more beans, while a bush bean has a set number of flowers and a set number of beans when they are ready, they are ready to be pole beans, however they will continue to produce throughout the season, so if you have a small amount of space, you will benefit much more from growing a row of pole beans than a row. of bush beans, but you have to provide them with some type of trellis to keep them upright and stay healthy so that they continue to produce and so that you can continue harvesting them throughout the season, forcing them to produce more.

Another natural primer is cucumbers, cucumber plants if you grow them at the base of a trellis, they will grab that trellis with their tendrils and just pull away. You may have to catch little escapees like this and train them back by sticking the leaves through the trellis and keeping an eye out. on them because they tend to cling to their neighbors and can smother other plants, however, they are very easy to grow on a trellis and by growing them upwards you avoid a lot of the difficulties and the fungus is powdery mildew and that type. of things that often remove cucumber plants because they are elevated off the ground and therefore the foliage remains dry, so remove the beans, which include fresh dried beans, peas.

I don't have any of those growing right now because it's too hot for them here, but we've grown a lot of peas and all these different types of trellises. Another thing you can grow on a trellis is melons. They are also natural climbers and have tendrils that grab onto the trellis and detach themselves and grow melons vertically. sometimes you have to offer some kind of support, as you can see here, this particular melon isa pantyhose, it's just kind of playing on the fact that some of these aren't compatible right now and that's fine, however, for a larger melon like a watermelon or anything that has a lot of weight to it, you'll want to offer it some support to prevent the stems from breaking when they begin to become brittle toward the end of the melon. mature tomatoes.

Tomatoes are not natural climbers, they actually just become friendly. of spreading on the wrong ground and growing more roots if given the opportunity to take indeterminate tomatoes, as I was talking about beans that will grow as long as you give them support and most tomato cages are between 30 and 36 inches tall. high. Like the Jumbo tomato cages, they are maybe 48 inches tall. These trellises are four foot cattle panels that we have now suspended about 20 inches. They are on raised beds so as you can see these trellises are much taller than I am and these plants are much taller than the trellises.

Let's see if we give them more room to grow, we get more tomatoes, they stay healthier. promotes air flow so vertical gardening this extends to things we may not even think about like tomatoes if we give them the space to grow they will and that increases the yield which is the point of cultivate these things in the first place. First place, what's up with the pumpkin thing? Well, let's take a look here. This is called prize Inca cream squash, which is a great variety of winter squash. It is now my first year to have a large garden with many vertical trellises.

I had read a blog that basically said you could train summer squash to grow bushy summer squash, specifically like yellow bent neck zucchini, so I tried it and it wasn't great. Now here's a big, healthy bush squash plant and if you look here, I'll show you how to do this. grows has the wrong stem, it comes out of the ground and then all these leaves coming off of it, so technically yes you could train this to grow, however in my experience it's really not worth it, that stem, this is a a fairly mature plant that has been producing for almost six weeks which is quite long for a summer squash and from the ground to the end of the stem it is maybe thirty inches, that's not very long, the plant is doing well , letting Bush know if you had really limited space you could lift that main stem like a tea pole or somewhere by tying it up, however I didn't want to go up and it would be necessary to go out and train daily tying it up every day and making sure that all the new growth is being trained to grow so that it grows that way.

I decided it wasn't worth it to me if you wanted to try it. You know, you have more power. I think you could do it. I just don't know if it's necessarily worth it because the thing is, those leaves are still going to branch very far, they're still going to have huge leaves on those long stems, and they're still going to take up, you know, a radius of a couple. feet, even if it was placed on a central stem, I know if that was really worth it, however, varieties of winter squash like these protected Inca cream puffs, this is the main stem of the drafted Inca cream puff and this is A plant from one seed and coming up and down, a winter squash plant can take up almost 20 square feet if it is allowed to crawl along the ground.

I placed this plant on this arch trellis. I have greatly minimized the footprint so that it doesn't take up much. A large portion of the garden is actually growing over the walkway here now winter squash vines like this one, they have tendrils and will climb however they just go anywhere and have to be trained to come back now. I check this pumpkin daily and every time little branches like this come off I just run them back through this trellis and by doing so we manage to keep this pumpkin on this trellis and it covers almost everything the plant is healthy it is not infested from any kind of powdery mildew or anything like that and when the postponing squash started to grow really big, I will support it with other pantyhose or like a plastic produce bag and that allows it to grow over the winter. plant squash in a raised bed, whereas if you don't grow them somehow up and out of the way, you may not be able to do it at all when it comes to growing squash, the real question you need to figure out if you're trying to decide.

If it is going to need vertical support it is whether it is a bushy habit or a climbing habit. Many winter squashes have climbing habits, however, there are some that have bushy habits and most summer squashes are bushy habits, so you just have to do it. look at it every time you buy seeds, what type of squash you are dealing with and therefore you will know if it is something you are trying to put on a trellis so obviously in these plants that have heavier fruits like a winter squash or a watermelon, these will require a sturdier trellis, while with peas or beans this is where you can really use them as a string Chellis, you could probably even do this with some smaller varieties of cucumbers, you would have no problem using a clothesline , a string or something like that. that you had tied very tightly that had a lot of tension, strength and support.

I actually found it really surprising that more people don't grow things vertically, however I think a lot of people are writing that off as an option because they just think it's going to be a lot of work to set up or a big financial investment, which it doesn't have to be. So. I truly believe that many people could benefit from growing their plants vertically and simply have a more successful and enjoyable gardening experience. Now it may take some clever thinking and a little more upfront work to set it up, but I really think it can go a long way toward having a more successful year of growth.

If you have any questions about this, please leave them. in the comments I'll be happy to help you and if we have a lot of questions I might make another video to explain those things, but I really want to encourage you to look at the resources that you have. and think about implementing some of these things in your own garden. I really hope this helps you, thank you very much for watching until next time.