Vertical Gardening: How to Grow More Vegetables in Less Space
Maximize your garden's potential with vertical gardening! Learn how to grow more vegetables in less space with these innovative tips.
If you don’t have that much space where you live but you’re interested in growing your vegetables and herbs, you can try vertical gardening.
When you grow your vegetables “upward,” you can take advantage of space, reduce pests, and create beautiful structures in your home.
This is a growing trend worldwide. In 2022, the market for vertical garden construction was valued at $1081 million, but the expectation is that it’ll be projected to reach $2468.3 million by 2032.
If you’re ready to make the most of a small space, let’s explore how to grow healthy vegetables with vertical gardening.
What is Vertical Gardening?
With this method, instead of growing plants in traditional plots of land or garden beds, you use structures like shelves, walls, or trellises.
Basically, you grow plants vertically. For those living in cities with limited space and access to land, this is a great way to delve into domestic agriculture.
With vertical gardening, you can also improve air circulation and sun exposure, reducing the risk of diseases and pests in your plants.
Of course, this isn’t only for those living in apartments in the city. If you have a small garden or bad soil quality, you can start your vegetable patch in a different but equally efficient way.
Why Choose Vertical Gardening?
This method offers advantages that go beyond what we mentioned. You can make use of small areas in your backyard or your apartment, even corners that you wouldn’t have done anything with before. Instead, you can start growing stuff in them. But let’s explore further.
● Ease of maintenance: if you have mobility issues, a vertical garden can help you get into a fun hobby. You won’t have to kneel on the ground or bend over to deal with weeds. Instead, you can water, prune, and harvest your plants with a lot less effort.
● Better plant health: Ground-dwelling pests, such as snails, for example, have a harder time reaching a vertical garden, and it’s a lot easier to get rid of them if they manage to get there.
Essential Tips for Starting Your Vertical Garden
Contrary to what you might think, vertical gardening isn’t much of a challenge when you go at it with the right approach. Instead, it becomes an enjoyable hobby. Here’s what you should consider:
1. Pick the Right Vegetables to Grow
You can’t plant every vegetable under the sun in a vertical garden, but the most common ones are very often suitable. Vining plants, such as tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, and beans, grow well in a vertical garden.
Research suggests that 39% of vertical gardeners grow herbs, so basil and parsley are also great choices to start with.
2. Build or Buy Support Structures
To create vertical spaces, you can go for hanging baskets, wall planters, and trellises. Of course, keep in mind what you’re going to grow since the structure needs to be able to support the plants as they grow.
3. Optimize Sunlight and Watering
Never pick a spot with too much shade for your vertical garden. It’s best to take advantage of that one place where the sun hits the entire day instead. You can always add shade with more plants or even shade cloth.
For watering, you can invest in a self-watering system or drip irrigation to avoid over and underwatering.
4. Use Quality Soil and Fertilizer
The soil is crucial in any kind of gardening you start. Do your research and see what works best for your area, and always try to go the natural way before using pesticides and fertilizers.
You should also research the particular needs of the plants you’re going to grow so that you can prepare natural fertilizers. Most of them are done with food scraps, like banana peels!
As usual, avoid clicking on suspicious websites or buying from shady online shops. Protect your data with a VPN for home network.
If you use an app to water your plants and measure things like sunlight and humidity, this is even more important, as hackers can target home devices with weak protection.
Conclusion
Vertical gardening is an innovative, relatively cheap, and fun way to grow more vegetables in unused space.
For people with small backyards or city apartments, this is ideal. Pick the right plants, build a solid structure, and stay consistent when doing maintenance, and you’ll have a great harvest in no time!