I love planning, creating, building, and gardening. So when I learned about raised beds and square foot gardening, I couldn't wait to get started! After two years with some great garden success I decided to add to it. I didn't want to take up more lawn space so I had to find a way to be inventive. I found the book "
Vertical Gardening: Grow Up, Not Out, for More Vegetables and Flowers in Much Less Space" by Derek Fell and I was inspired! It was a great book about gardening in general. I have to admit that it didn't go into building the actual structures as much as I would have liked it to. But, it gave me what I needed to figure out what I could create and be successful with it. Dave and I took a trip to the hardware store and looked at our options. We decided to go with a PVC structure. Seriously this project took less than a half a day and only that long because we had to go shopping for the materials. We purchased 4-foot rod iron bars and hammered them as far as they would go into the ground. We cut the pipe to fit the garden boxes. We placed the upright pipes over the rod iron placed the elbow connectors on the top and connected each of the uprights with the cross bars. We thread the pipes through nylon garden net. Finished! So easy and it ended up looking better than we imagined. The book explained what plants could be trained on the netting and which plants to plant in front of them. So in the middle we have zuchini, summer squash, butternut squash, acorn squash, and cucumbers. We have a box with just tomatoes and Yanna's merigolds in front of them which she loves watering each day. In front of the squashes I have a variety of peppers and herbs. I then have another box with my salad garden which I am picking from right now. YUM!! You can definitely do this as well as so many other vertical gardening ideas for your space!!
