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 guys about why vertical gardening just makes sense and how easy it actually is so if you do a quick search online for vertical gardening it's going to come back up with a lot of really cute ideas things like pot suspended on a wall or gutters built on a stair-step structure all kinds of really great ideas for growing plants upwards however if what you have in mind is gardening up for production little pots aren't really going to be what you're looking for I found and a lot of my research that when I was looking for vertical gardening information and inspiration when it came to edibles there wasn't really just a whole lot out there so what exactly is Hartlepool gardening it's curling things up pretty much it doesn't have to be fancy it's just growing things up instead of allowing them to ramble around on the ground so the first big question about doing that would be why why would you want to train your food to grow up well there are a few really good reasons first space I mean the footprint of this squash plant if it were grown rambling across the ground would be about 20 square feet you would have to a lot that much space in your garden for that single plant however by growing it up and over this arched trellis it's sharing a bed space with this pineapple ground cherry with these cherry tomatoes over on this side which though this is one seed one plant on this it's planted down in this corner over on this side where it's 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 gets reduced from 20 square feet to I mean almost none I mean it's literally a lot of just a few square feet on both sides where the trellises and other than that it's just covering the walkway adding Beauty to the garden the second benefit of vertical gardening is how much easier it makes harvesting and for instance these cucumbers they're right here at a waist height so I get to just stand here and pick them picking stuff when it's upright is so much easier on your back and your knee this is a whole lot easier than crawling around on the ground looking for your fruit underneath all the leaves and it puts your food up right in front of you so you're not as likely to miss fruits I don't know about you but I know that even with vertical garden I occasionally get surprised by a huge cucumber or something that I completely missed but I know that when I was growing things on the ground I was much more frequently surprised by fruits that we had been hidden underneath the foliage the third benefit of vertical gardening is it makes for much healthier plants whenever you've got your plants trained up a trellis they're not lying there in the dirt and they're not getting splash back from watering and rain upon the leaves therefore they're not staying moist moist foliage and your plants getting dirty like that that's a huge recipe for bacterial and fungal infections blights wilts and when your fruit is hanging up off the ground it's out of the reach of little critters that would like to come along and eat it before you get a chance to the last benefit of vertical gardening is that it's beautiful it adds line and structure to the design of your garden while being completely functional it puts your food on display so that you can come out and enjoy it as it grows and it makes for spaces that are just interesting and engaging as well as very productive so we can agree that vertical gardening is definitely functional it's definitely aesthetically pleasing but is it economical well like with most things it really depends on how you go about it there are going to be different kinds of trellises for all different kinds 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 have to take my word for it let's go check out exactly how expensive buying vertical trellises can be I chose to check prices at the Home Depot this is where I come and buy things when I need them for my homestead obviously things would be even more expensive if you were to go to something like a specialty garden center when I figured this would be a good place to look to find what the low end of prices on something like this would be okay here we have some decorative trellises the 72 inch one and is $35.98 oh yeah 3498 on this 80 inch scroll trellis these hooks here are 1278 each here just these regular like a pot trellis for $10 a fan trellis for 15 obviously if you are deciding to go that route things would add up really quickly if you were growing much of anything at all because you know one of those 80 inch trellises could probably handle like a cucumber plant so if you're looking at doing any sort of canning or if you are supporting a you know a large family off your garden it's just not going to be feasible at all to come by trellises for that scale of production I'm looking for fencing if you're on your anyone total vacuum force dancers I'm not finding it found it I was on the wrong end of the story all right so now let's talk about what else you could use instead of buying trellises that are packaged for the purpose of trellising plants now I understand that some people may have a completely different goal for me they may want a really pretty garden where everything is fancy it may be beneficial to them to have some sort of trellises that are very elaborate or decorative I give you that that is beautiful however in the case of my garden it was for me a matter of how do I make it as functional and productive as possible while keeping the price point as low as possible and then within that making it beautiful so just really quick let's look at some of these fencing materials that they have here at home home depot another reason why I came here is because this is more widely available as far as looking at the price points whereas you know if I go to my local farmers co-op they might have a really great deal but it's not available to most of you so here we have a 50-foot row of welded wire for 35 dollars that's 50 feet for 35 dollars at 600 inches so for pretty much the same price point of getting 80 inches of vertical trellising space if you buy a premade trellis that is that is packaged to you for the purpose of trellising plants you can get 600 inches of a material that everything I've ever grown would climb just fine on this now you have to unroll it you have to cut it you have to attach it to something to stand it upright we have typically used T posts for this they run three to five dollars each depending on how tall they are here our T posts down here we've got a 5 foot you posts for 4 dollars six-foot t-post 4 4 448 obviously these are really affordable options here is a 6 foot steel tee post for 378 hairs chicken wire now chicken wire doesn't isn't going to hold up as long as these welded wire fencing materials or cattle panels which are my favorite things to use for trellises but I'm trying to show some other options since I know not everybody has those available to them but this is like a coated chicken wire PVC coated green poultry netting $20 for a 25 foot roll it's 2 feet wide you could quite simply take all kinds of frames and attach the chicken wire and create some sort of trellis you could take an old bed frame that you could take an old window frame you could take a pallet and knock out some of the center boards and just staple some chicken wire and prop it up what you're trying to create is just some sort of sturdy framework for your plants to be able to grab hold of and grow up now my preferred route is obviously cattle panels we we call these cattle panels they come in 18-foot pieces this is what we've made our just out of you haven't seen our video on that you can check it out I'll put the link in the bio you can cut these we use bolt cutters in order to cut them and configure them in all different kinds of ways they might be sold as hog panels livestock panels but if you call any sort of like farm supply store or tractor supply anything like that and describe this what you're looking for cattle panels hog panels they'll know what you're talking about they are only 20 to 25 dollars each I've had some people tell me in their area that they're 30-plus dollars even with that being the case it is more economical than buying pre-made trellises that are sold for the purpose of gardening but let's say you don't have the budget to go out and buy cattle panels that doesn't mean vertical gardening is out of the question for you there are a lot of ways that you can create trellises on a budget by using found materials one good way to get materials if you cannot afford to buy them is find out if anyone in your area has any fencing that they no longer want gates fencing fence posts all of that stuff a lot of times people are looking to get rid of stuff like that but they just need someone to haul it off or come take it down yeah that's a little bit of Labor but if it saves you a whole lot of money it's worth it this trellis which we have tomatoes growing up right now it's just a piece of 6-foot fence that we unrolled and attached to some tea posts they're all mix match Heights and we're gonna grow tomatoes up this two pieces of a dog crate that someone gave us because the door on it was broken those set back in are kind of a junk for a while and I finally brought him up here and I'm growing squash on the here's a gate I'm pretty sure someone gave this to us because they said you know hey we're about to put this out at the side of the road we replaced our fencing and we thought maybe you could do something with it so we picked that up we use zip ties to connect everything all of this all of these are materials which are affordable they're pretty easy to put together it doesn't take does it take any grand carpentry skills to drive a tee post and attach up you know a gate or a piece of metal fencing to that T post with zip ties but let's say that you are not in a place where you can get those things say you don't have a truck or you don't have the ability to move the manoeuvre these big panels by yourself before I had this garden before I had all of these trellises I grew peas and beans pull beans and climbing peas by just putting a few tea posts in the ground and running clothesline between them it just gave the peas and the beans something to climb up it worked wonderfully at the end of the season I did have to take it down whereas these things you put up and you could leave them up for years if you wanted to so what can you grow vertically pole beans these particular ones are called noodle beans runner beans any sort of climbing bean you don't even have to coax 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 you don't have the space to grow a whole lot of bush beans or rows of beans you can grow way more beans on one pole being plant than one bush bean plant because essentially when it comes to beans a pole bean is the equivalent of an indeterminate tomato whereas a bush bean is the equivalent of a determinate variety it means that as long as you continue to provide support for them and keep those plants healthy they will continue to put off flowers and therefore put off more beans whereas a bush bean has a determined amount of flowers and a determined amount of beans when they're done they're done a pole bean however will keep producing throughout the season so if you've got a small amount of space you benefit way more from growing a row of pole beans than you do a row of bush beans but you have to provide them some sort of trellising to keep them upright so they stay healthy so they continue to produce and so you can continue to harvest 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 hold of that trellis with their tendrils and just take off you might have to catch little runaways like this and kind of train it back up by tucking the leaves through the trellis and keep an eye on them because they have a tendency to grab hold of their neighbors and can choke out other plants however they are super easy to grow on a trellis and by growing them upwards you avoid a lot of the plights and the fungus is powdery mildew and the kind of things that often take out cucumber plants because they're up off the ground and therefore the foliage stays dry so pull beans which include fresh eating dried beans runner beans peas I don't have any of those growing right now because it's too hot for them here but we have grown many peas and all these different kinds of trellises another thing you can grow on a trellis is melons they are also natural climbers which that they have tendrils which kind of grab hold of the trellis and take off and growing melons vertically you do sometimes have to offer some sort of support as you can see here this particular melon is an pantyhose it's just kind of playing around with that some of these are not supported right now and they're doing okay however for a bigger melon like a watermelon or anything it's gonna have a lot of weight to it you would want to offer it some support to keep the stems from breaking when they start getting brittle towards the end of the melon ripening tomatoes tomatoes are not natural climbers they actually will naturally just kind of sprawl out a wrong ground and grow more roots if they're given the chance indeterminate tomatoes like I was talking about the beans they will grow as long as you will provide support for them and most tomato cages are like 30 to 36 inches tall them like the Jumbo tomato cages they are you know maybe 48 inches tall these trellises are four feet cattle panels which we have suspended up about 20 inches now they're in raised beds so as you can see these trellises are quite a lot taller than me and these plants are quite a lot taller than the trellises see if we will provide more space to grow up we will get more Tomatoes they stay healthier it promotes air flow so vertical gardening this this extends to things that we might not even think about things like tomatoes if we give them the space to grow up they will and in that that increases your harvest which is the point of growing this stuff in the first place what about the subject of squash well let's take a look here this is called awarded Incan creampuff squash which is a large variety of winter squash now my first year to have a big garden with a lot of vertical trellises I had read a blog that basically said that you could train summer squash to grow up Bush summer squashes specifically like zucchinis yellow crookneck so I tried it and it wasn't great now here is a big healthy bush squash plant and if you look in here I'll show you how this grows it's got one wrong stalk it comes up from the ground and then all of these leaves that come off of it so technically yes you could train this to grow up however in my experience it's really not worth it um that stalk this is a this is a pretty mature plant this is been producing for almost six weeks now that's pretty long for a summer squash and from the ground to the end of that stalk is maybe thirty inches that's that's not very long that plant is doing just fine allowing it to Bush know if you had a really limited space you could train that main stalk up like a tea post or someplace out by tying it off however it did not want to go up and it would take daily coming out and training that tying it up every single day and making sure all the new growth is being trained to go up in order for that to grow that way I decided that wasn't worth it for me if you wanted to try it you know more power to you I think that you could do it I just don't know that it's necessarily worth it because the thing is is those leaves are still going to branch out really far it's still gonna have this huge leaves on those long stems and it's still going to take up you know a radius of a couple of feet even if it was trained up on a center stalk know if that was really worth it however winter squash varieties like this warded Incan cream puffs this is the main stalk of the worded Incan cream puff and this is one plant from one seed and it comes all the way over and all the way down one winter squash plant can take up almost 20 square feet if allowed to trail along the ground I putting this one plant on this arch trellis I've minimized the footprint greatly so it's not taking up a huge portion of the garden it's actually just growing over the walkway here now vining winter squashes like this one they they do have tendrils and they will climb however they kind of just go wherever and you have to just sort of train them back now I check on this squash daily and whenever little branches like this kind of take off I just sort of run it back through this trellis and in doing so we've managed to keep this squash on this trellis and it's covering almost the entire thing the plant is healthy it's not being riddled by any sort of like powdery mildew or anything like that and when the squash that it puts off started getting really big I'll provide it some support with other pantyhose or like a plastic produce bag and that allows me to grow a winter squash plant in a raised bed whereas if you didn't grow them somehow up and out of the way you might not be able to do that at all when it comes to growing squash the real question that you need to figure out if you're trying to decide if it is going to need vertical support is whether it is a bush habit or a vining habit many winter squashes are vining habits however there are some that are Bush habits and most summer squashes are Bush habits so you just kind of have to look at it into it whenever you buy your seeds which kind of squash you're dealing with and therefore you'll know if it is something that be trying to a trellis so obviously on these plants that have heavier fruit like a winter squash or a watermelon these are going to require a sturdier trellis whereas with peas or beans that's where you can really utilize like a string Chellis you could even probably do that with some smaller cucumber varieties you'd have no problem using a you know clothesline or twine or something that you had tied up very tightly that had a lot of good tension and strength and support I've actually found it really surprising that more people don't grow things vertically however I think that a lot of people are discounting that as an option because they simply think it's gonna be a lot of work to establish or a large financial investment which it doesn't have to be I really do believe that so many people could benefit from growing their plants vertically and just have a more successful and enjoyable gardening experience now it might take some resourceful thinking and a little bit more work on the front end to get it established but I really do believe that it can be a huge help in having a more successful growing year you have any questions about this please put it down in the comments I'll be happy to help you and if we get a whole lot of questions I might do another video kind of explaining that stuff but I really I really do want to encourage you guys to look around at the resources that you have and think about implementing some of these things in your own garden I really hope this helps you guys thank you so much for watching until next time [Music]

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 1,806,861

Keywords: gardening, vertical garden, garden trellis ideas, gardening ideas, gardening tips, garden tips, organic garden, growing food, grow your own food, homesteading, garden trellises, growing food vertically, edible gardening, raised bed garden, how to build a trellis, jessica sowards, homesteading vlog, best homestead channels, large garden vlog, gardening vlog, vegetable gardening, vegetable gardens, potager

Id: TdI2YrNIf5g

Length: 23min 45sec (1425 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018