TOWER POWER
Forget about your ho-hum garden on the ground and reach for the sun with our vertical trellised tomatoes, squash and cucumbers.
The way to better cukes, tomatoes and a host of other
veggies - is up.
RELATED CONTENT
Building Tomato Towers February/March 2001
Of all the methods devised to ...
Have fun with sticks — transform them into useful, attractive wattle and wickets....
MOTHER has come a long way from her modest start way back in January of 1970 and so have many of he...
Tipis and Yurts
December/January 2002
by Heidi Hunt
Nomadic people have used portable tipis...
Here's two tipis Charles Worth built and lived in, and the most unique thing about them is they did...
by Brook Elliot
It wasn't just the cucumbers that had him surprised. A good
percentage of my garden grows upward, instead of outward.
Indeed, my vegetable patch is a virtual forest of stakes,
wire towers, trellises and other supports. In fact, it's
always a shock to me to see gardens that do not use
vertical supports. Toward the end of this season, for
instance, I visited a friend who was very proud of his
garden, especially his tomato patch. "I've got five
varieties growing," he exclaimed, "each a different color.
What a beautiful display they make."
When I got there, however, I found his tomatoes running
wild, with no supports. The ground was a jungle of vines,
with a lot of half-rotted fruit lying on the damp ground.
Nearby, where he'd grown his tomatoes a previous year,
there was a mass of volunteer plants choking out his wife's
flowers.
Of the many reasons to grow crops vertically, the biggest
is space. By training vegetables upward, you can plant more
in the same area. This method also frees up ground for
other crops.
Keep in mind that most plant spacing recommendations are
based on the use of mechanical cultivators, but in a
vertical garden, you can grow veggies surprisingly close to
one another.
Take those cukes Pat admired so much. I grew them on a
plastic mesh trellis, 8' long and 6' high. Seeds were
planted in rows four inches outwards on both sides of the
fencing, and the plants were thinned to 4" apart - that's
right, only 4". The end result is a wall of cucumber vines
whose flowers are fully exposed to bees and other
pollinators, which results in a higher crop yield.
When you grow vertically, each plant gets more sunlight
than if it were sprawling on the ground, which in turn
produces stronger plants with exuberant foliage growth.
These leaves provide enough shade to prevent sunscald, even
though the fruits appear to be more exposed. In fact, the
leaves provide so much coverage that I'll often find
veggies my wife and I missed while harvesting.
Page: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
Next >>
