How to Grow Squash Vertically...EVEN ZUCCHINI! Small Space Gardening.

so if you're like me you might think that in your limited growing space you don't have room for members of the corbett family like winter and summer squash melons pumpkins they just take up too much space in this video i'm gonna show you how to take these plants vertical to open up more growing space in your garden and it's easier than you think for ways to do it coming up [Music] hey guys I'm Brian with California Garden TV and if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help you grow your best garden ever you're in the right place get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything now let's get growing vertically now you guys might think that I have more growing space than I actually do because of all the produce I get out of it technically in my backyard raised beds which is most of my vegetable growing space I only have a hundred and seventy square feet the way I get more production out of this small space is just about every single bed actually every bed has some sort of vertical element to it and that way I have the option opportunity to take that 170 square feet of growing space and multiply that into 1,300 cubic feet of growing space now you guys all know that I grow my Tomatoes vertically right and beans are kind of a no-brainer but how about things like cucumbers okay how about some winter squashes a little out of the ordinary but nothing too crazy how about watermelons and pumpkins now we're getting weird well what about summer squash and zucchini that's just crazy talk right now the first method is the most prominent in my garden and that is the tepees now I did a video in the spring about how to make these teepees for free or really cheap so go ahead and check that out I'll put a link down in the description of the video to that one the second way is with a cattle panel or something similar these are a metal grid used for fencing they're incredibly durable and affordable the third way is with the string method like I use for my tomatoes the last method involves using a simple wooden stake so teepees are great for beans but they're also great for just about any member of the winter squash and gourds plants that love go nuts that like to ramble all over everything they also generally have small to medium-size fruits that don't need a lot of extra support from the gardener on this one I'm growing my loofah it did really well on the teepees last year and I will never grow it any other way over here on the other side of the path I have my birdhouse gourds on this teepee and it's actually taken over this teepee and it's working its way into another one that I had for cucumbers and I had no idea how crazy these grew and it smothered out the cucumber and took its teepee but last year I had cucumbers on teepees as well and they did really great when they didn't have a thug like this next to them you can see that this one's loaded with gourds one of them is really big already now I've tried growing medium-sized pumpkins and melons on the tepees the problem with that is sometimes they get a little big and they need some support and you can use like pantyhose made into a sling or mesh bags but you have to tie those on somewhere and with the bamboo you know they're almost vertical and they're slick and so they kind of just slid right down the bamboo cane so if you're wanting to grow pumpkins and melons a better solution for that our cattle panels now cattle panels are basically a panel fence made of very strong metal that lasts for years and years and years now I've heard from a lot of you when I did videos on cattle panels before especially in Europe that you can't find those there in that case you can use a wooden lath trellis it won't last forever but it will serve the purpose now in either of those situations you want to take either rebar or a tee post or two and drive those into the ground and then lash the trellis or the cattle panel to it with zip ties creates a really strong support now over at Tammy's garden this year she is using my cattle panel to grow watermelon miniature sugar baby watermelon and cantaloupe the large openings in the cattle panel allow the plant to have lots of room to grow and to climb naturally you might need a little training in the beginning but they'll they'll figure it out but it's got a lot of cross pieces for you to be able to secure any type of sling or support that maybe larger fruits might need now they're also great for winter squashes like spaghetti squash butternut squash I've grown them on their successfully many times if you have a vertical string trellis like I have for my Tomatoes those are perfect for growing cucumbers you can see over here I've got my Armenian cucumbers they're already to the top of the trellis but cucumbers were really really great this way and it's a great way to fit a lot of cucumbers into a very small space a lot of times when cucumbers grow along the ground they get diseased the fruit turn into some weird shapes may be discolored and they get nibbled on by pests if you grow them up vertically like this it gives them good airflow so the disease process you know doesn't have a chance to get started in the first place plus you get rid of the misshapen fruit and the pest problems and it's just an all over better way to grow them now you do it the same way as the tomatoes landscape staples in the ground run the string up to the top and then wind the cucumber around the string as it grows its tendrils will also help it climb and hold on that's something Tomatoes don't have and you can also use this method to grow miniature pumpkins or smaller winter squashes now how about those summer squash zucchini and yellow my two favorites so I thought I invented this method I was really proud of myself and then I saw a couple of other people doing it always the case right come up with a million dollar brand new idea and realized very quickly that there are very few new ideas I was always annoyed because summer squashes they take up so much space you start out in one spot and then throughout the season they snake their way through the bed and the trunk is like two feet three feet long and they end up in another space altogether and so that's a lot of wasted space in there that you could have had other crops growing in so in the same vein as everything else I decided to go vertical at planting time you drive a stake one or two feet into the ground you want it to be pretty sturdy because these do get top-heavy when they reach the for the stick so you don't want toppling over plant the plant next to the stake and as it grows just tie the main trunk onto that stake for the lifetime of the plant it'll get taller and taller and taller now as it grows the bottom leaves will be will turn yellow look old maybe get mildew disease just chop those off and in the end you're gonna have a trunk like a tree with a zucchini plant on top and it's gonna produce all the way up that trunk the whole season so first of all this saves a ton of space second you get to fruit up off the ground out of the way of pests that would come along and nibble it third as it grows any way you grow it you need to take off the old leaves as they get old and diseased and this makes it really easy to do that forth as you can see in this bed if these were all on the ground it would be just kind of a carpet of leaves this gets them up off the ground the air flows right through the plants and it keeps them very close to disease free and then the last benefit of this is it gets the flowers and the fruit up off the ground and this way they're up in the air where the the pollinators are basically you're bringing them into their eye level because a lot of times you'll see a canopy of leaves in your squash patch and you can't really see the blooms because they're hidden underneath all the leaves so as you can see these are prominent and as soon as these open the bees will be right in there now chances are you've already started your summer squash and you didn't put a stake in the ground and you hadn't planned on doing this but it's a really easy transition get these little wooden stakes at the garden center or Home Depot and like I said drive them in two feet but not a foot or two but not next to the plant at least six inches away from the plant and so once that plant then or if it's already reaching that post very gently move it into location and tie it on as low as possible without bending or breaking that main stem and then continue on like you would now I used to use twine and then elastic ties to tie these on to the stake the only problem with that it works but because the ties or the twine is very flimsy you find it hard especially the beginning trying to pull the plant up to the stake and then tie it on because the strings are flopping all over the place now what I use is this and all this is is sprinkler conduit you can get this at Home Depot or even Amazon sells it it's the wire you would use for sprinkler systems and the reason I like it is because it's very bendable and it's flexible but it stays in place so you only need one hand to be able to wrap this around the trunk and the stake and then tie it together it's not gonna be flopping you're not gonna be trying use the twine you'll see what I mean you'll go for this immediately you could also use zip ties I think that would work just don't tighten them up really tight because you need to allow space for that trunk or stem to expand as it grows taller but literally I've been using this for 15 years I got a spool of it 15 years ago and I use it over and over and over every year on everything not just plants I found uses for it for everything so it's one of those things that you can buy that you can literally will last you a lifetime so that's it four different ways to grow every kind of squash vertically let me know in the comments if you're already using one of these methods and how it's working for you or a few plot of one that's completely different that maybe no one else has ever used before and let us know that in the comments as well and I will see you guys on Tuesday [Music]

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 720,006

Keywords: grow squash vertically, grow squash on a trellis, grow squash in containers, grow squash in raised beds, grow zucchini vertically, grow zucchini in containers, grow zucchini on a trellis, grow zucchini in a raised bed, grow melons vertically, grow melons in a raised bed, grow melons on a trellis, grow melons in containers, grow watermelon vertically, vertical gardening, small space gardening, cucurbit, fertilizer for squash, fertilizer for zucchini, fertilizer for melons

Id: MEOLY9D5n2k

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020