C O N T E N T SIdeas for Small Gardens: Growing Vegetables Vertically

Growing Fruit and Vegetables in Small Spaces

Planning a Square Foot Vegetable Garden

How to Grow Vegetables and Fruit in Hanging Baskets

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Ideas for Small Gardens - Growing Vegetables Verticallyby Benedict Vanheems for GrowVeg.com

When space is tight and when, as a keen kitchen gardener, you’ve simply run out of space there’s only one option left – head skywards! Given the burgeon-ing popularity of container gardening, it’s evident that garden sizes are steadily shrinking, especially in my crowded island home of the United Kingdom. Vertical growing is the ultimate technique for bijoux gardens that makes use of the one dimension that there’s plenty of; in this instance the sky really is the limit! Vertical growing has come of age over the

past few years, with many off-the-shelf contraptions helping space-strapped gardeners get the most from their plot. The really clever ones can turn a bland garden wall into a fresh flush of salads, herbs and fruit – and what home-grown devotee wouldn’t want that? Meanwhile there’s all manner of climbing veg plus sprawlers that can be tied into position which will help you to boost productivity from the meanest of footprints.

Climbers and SprawlersA great place to begin to satisfy lofty ambitions iswith the vegetables and fruits that naturally climb orcan be made to do so with gentle encouragement.This includes the likes of climbing/pole beans, clim-bing peas, vine tomatoes and the cucurbits: cucum-bers, melons, squashes, pumpkins, gourds and

sprawling types of courgette/zucchini. If you’re reading thisin a warmer part of the worldyou can add sweet potatoes to this list.

Many climbers produce tendrils that grip the structure they are climbing to literally pull the plant up as it grows. Others, such as the beans, will wind their way around a sup-port to head skywards. The natural sprawlers such as vine tomatoes and courgettes may require tying in to their supports at regular intervals. Either way these will all make the most of the vertical plane.

Most tree fruits such as apples and cherries can be trained into space-efficient shapes: vertical cordons, espaliers, fan shapes or any manner of creative but fence-hugging formations. Cane fruits like raspberries and blackberries grow naturally tall – the trick here is to keep them from flailing around onto their neighbours. Grow them hemmed in between rows of parallel wires or tie individual plants to vertical posts.

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Vertical Growing IdeasThere are plenty of ways to make the mostof the vertical plane. Here are just a fewideas to get you started.

A-frames: These can be made from woodentrellis, horizontal battens of wood or nettingheld taut between the two frames. Lean theframes together and secure at the top withwire or hinges. Grow climbers up the twoframes and use the space between to growplants that will appreciate shade during the warmer summer weather: salad leaves and spinach for example. A well-constructed frame can be used year after year – just pull it free from the ground at the end of the season and store in a shed or garage.

Living wall: Invest in one of the many wall or fence-mounted modular planters or panels available. Fabric Wool-ly Pockets are just one example. There are also many stackable planters that can be built from the ground up. Plant them up with herbs, salads and strawberries and watch a blank space take on a whole new life. Try making your own by hammering in or hanging from hooks all manner of recycled containers: large food tins with holes punched into the bottom for drainage (try painting them for additional interest), rows of window boxes secured one above the other or even pots made from old undergarments as seen at a recent flower show!

Hanging about: As well as growing up from below, many climbing or sprawling edibles can be grown from above and left to hang down. Vine to-matoes are best for this and work well in ‘upside-down’ planters. Make a hole into a large bucket that’s just big enough to allow you to plant up the tomato. The hole must also allow the stem to thicken as the plant grows. Plant the tomato, feeding compost around the rootball and fill to the top

of the bucket. Sow or plant at the top shallow-rooters such as lettuce, radish, basil or stump-rooted carrots. Hang up then feed and water from above while the tomato erupts out from beneath. You can also grow strawberries and other fruiting veg such as peppers and aubergine/eggplant in this way. The result is literally buckets of produce!

Edible divider: Looking to divide up areas of your garden? An edible divider is far more attractive than a solid conifer hedge or artificial alternative – and you can eat it! Espaliered fruit trees (where the branches run parallel to each other in horizontal rows) make excellent natural dividers. Train the trees onto trellis to provide an all-year-round divider and plant the base up with annual vegetables or flowering herbs such as rosemary to keep pollinat-

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ing insects busy for longer. Annual climbing veg such as peas and beans make excellent seasonal screens and have the bonus of being very quick growing. Sound options for supporting them can be found here.

Archway of delights: Visitors will immediately know you’re a passion-ate grower of all things edible if you plant an edible archway leading up to your front door. Simply plant each archway support with its own climber and watch as over the growing season the archway is consumed by a lush jungle of foliage, pods and fruits. Squashes and beans with coloured pods (try alternating purple and yellow-podded varieties such as ‘Blauhilde’ and ‘Goldfield’) look especially impressive given this treat-ment. The pods and fruits will dangle down above head height to create quite a visual impact. Beans with strongly coloured flowers such as the classic ‘Scarlet Emperor’ are as floriferous as the best of the traditional ornamental climbers – a feast for both the eyes and stomach.

Try out a few of these sky-reaching options and see how much more produce you can get from your plot. I’d be very interested to learn of your vertical growing experiences, so please share any other ideas for vertical growing below. Photographs courtesy of: Burgon & Ball

Growing Fruit and Vegetables in Small Spacesby Kate Bradbury for GrowVeg.com

It is remarkable how many delicious vegetables you can fit into a small growing area or raised bed. Tomatoes, courgettes and po-tatoes can all be squeezed into tight spaces. The key to success is ensuring you make the best use of the space you have with clever planting techniques and the right crops.

Seed companies are frequently producing new varieties of vegetables that can be grown as dwarf plants, in small areas and even in pots. Even large squash plants come in varieties that can be grown up a trellis (saving much-needed soil space), and you can grow a decent crop of aubergines from just a couple of dwarf plants.

Choosing which vegetables to growBefore planting, think carefully about what you want to grow. Nearly all vegetables can be cultivated in smaller areas, but there is no point dedicating space to a crop you are not keen on

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eating. It is also worth avoiding vegetables that take up a large amount of space. These include:

• asparagus• Brussels sprouts• celery• squashes (unless climbing)• maincrop potatoes

It is a good idea to choose vegetables that are expen- sive to buy in the shops, taste better when fresh and are quick to grow. Many legumes (peas and beans) fall under all of these categories. Because they have a high sugar content, legumes taste best when eaten within an hour of being picked. After this, the sugar turns to starch, leaving them tasteless and bland. They can cost a lot to buy in the shops and, often, they have been lying on the shelves for some days before purchase, reducing their taste. Legumes that grow well in small spaces include:

• runner beans• broad beans• french beans• peas

Dwarf varieties grow well in containers wher-eas climbing ones make excellent use ofvertical space (such as walls and fences) whilstalso looking attractive.

Many salad leaves, such as rocket, are expensive and taste of very little after they have been packed and then left on a supermarket shelf. The leaves are easy to grow and take up very little space. They can even be grown amongst other plants, to maximise soil space.

Using Your SpaceIf you only have a small space in which to grow vegetables, you should grow crops that will be out of the ground within a few weeks rather than months. If you are growing potatoes, grow new potato varieties that will be ready to eat in July rather than maincrop varieties which may not be ready until Sep-tember. Have seedlings of other vegetables on standby, ready to go straight into the soil as soon as your first crop has come out – brassicas such as winter cabbage or broccoli seedlings can be planted after you have harvested all your peas or beans. Further, if you leave the stumps of the peas and beans in the ground after you have removed the rest of the plant, their roots will continue to provide nitrogen to feed your hungry cabbages.

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IntercroppingYou could try growing fast- and slow-growing crops together, or ‘intercropping’, to maximise space. Many crops that eventually take up a large amount of space (such as tomatoes and potatoes) do not actually use this space until they have reached their full size. Take advantage of this by planting a few fast-growing radishes, salad leaves or beetroot in the soil in between rows of the larger plants. By the time the space is needed by the larger plants yourfast-growing crops will be long gone. It is also worth training late climbing bean plants up sweetcorn, sowing let-tuce seeds among your tomato plants, and spinach in between broad beans.

Square Foot GardeningIf you are looking for a step-by-step guide to getting themaximum harvest of vegetables from raised beds thentake a look at our article on the Square Foot Gardeningmethod.

Summary• If space is limited, choose crops which you love to

eat and which are expensive to buy in the shops.• Avoid growing crops that take up a large amount of

space (such as asparagus) or take months to grow (such as pumpkins or parsnips).

• Grow fast-growing crops (such as lettuce, radish and beetroot) around the base of larger plants (such as potatoes and tomatoes).

• Have seedlings of crops on standby to go straight into the soil once you have harvested the previous crop.

Planning a Square Foot Vegetable Gardenby Jeremy Dore for GrowVeg.com

Square Foot Gardening (commonly referred to as SFG) is a planting method that was developed by Amer-ican author and TV presenter Mel Bartholomew in the 1970s. It’s a simple way to create easy-to-manage gardens with raised beds that need a minimum of time spent maintaining them. SFG rapidly gained popularity during the 1980s through Mel’s first book and television series and since then has spread across the world, eventually going ‘mainstream’ with several companies offering ready-to-assemble SFG gardens. SFG advocates claim it produces more, uses less soil and water and takes just 2% of the time spent on a traditional garden. So what makes Square Foot Gardening special and why don’t all gardeners use it?

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SFG was developed as a reaction to the ineffi-ciencies of traditional gardening. In 1975 Mel Bartholomew had just retired as an engineer and decided to take up gardening as a hobby. It was only natural that he would apply his analytical skills to the problems he encountered. In partic-ular he found the average gardener was spending hours weeding the big gaps between long rows of plants, creating unnecessary work for them-selves. It soon became clear that getting rid of

rows and using intensive deep-beds could dramatically cut the amount of maintenance the garden required. Add a one-foot square grid on top and it became easy to space and rotate crops.

The Square Foot Gardening SystemOver the years the SFG system has evolved into aprecise set of rules:

• Create Deep Raised Beds: Typically 4 feet by 4 feet, with a square foot lattice placed on top to visually separate the crops. Beds are between 6 and 12 inches deep which gives the plants plenty of rich nutrients, while maintain-ing good drainage.

• Use a Specific Soil Mix: One third each of compost, peat moss and vermiculite. This starts the raised beds completely weed-free as well as being water retentive and full of nutri-ents.

• Don’t Walk on the Soil: This is now common practice with raised bed gardening but back in the 1970s it was revolutionary to suggest that you wouldn’t need to dig your soil if you didn’t tread on it.

• Plant in Squares: To keep the planting simple there are no plant spacings to remember. In-stead each square has either 1, 4, 9 or 16 plants in it depending on the size of the plant – easy to position in each square by making a smaller grid in the soil with your fingers. As an excep-tion to this there are a few larger plants that span two squares. Climbing peas and beans are planted in two mini-rows of 4 per square.

Click to watch

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• Thin with Scissors: Instead of pulling up ex-cess plants which can disturb the root systems of the plants you want to grow you snip them off with scissors.

• Accessorise: As well as details of all the above the All New Square Foot Gardening book has practical instructions for constructing various accessories including protective cages that easily lift on and off the SFG beds, covers to extend the season and supports for vertical growing.

There’s a purpose to each of these ‘rules’ and together they make up a powerful and almost fail-safe method for successful gardening. It’s a great method for new gardeners, people who have little time, the elderly or disabled (SFG gardens can be built at a raised height to make them more accessible) and children. Many schools have em-braced the SFG method because it’s easy to install and maintain without becoming an additional burden for the teacher. However, there are some limitations:

• Easy to Outgrow: Although many vegetables can be grown in SFG gar-dens it struggles to accommodate larger plants (squash, melons, main-crop potatoes etc), perennials (globe artichokes, rhubarb) and fruit bush-es/trees. Once new gardeners experience the success of SFG gardens they often want to expand the range of crops they grow beyond the standard SFG crops.

• Non-renewable Resources: There’s no doubt that ‘Mel’s Mix’ makes an excellent soil for vegetables . However, two of the three ingredients come from non-renewable sources. Peat takes thousands of years to develop and is a valuable natural sink for greenhouse gases. Vermiculite is mined and is therefore also a non-renewable resource with a significant carbon footprint. In common with many gardeners I won’t use peat and would prefer not to use vermiculite.

• Expensive for Large Gardens: Although SFG beds are cheap to maintain they are quite expensive to set up if you have a large area and want to fill it quickly.

None of these reasons prevent SFG from being a useful part of a garden though – you can use 100% recycled compost in the beds instead of Mel’s Mix, gradually build up the number of SFG beds and combine it with areas of your garden which are set aside for fruit trees and larger crops. Many of the SFG techniques that were revolutionary in the 1980s are now commonly used for vegetable gardening – deep raised beds, not compacting soil, removable covers and plant supports etc.

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Planning a Square Foot GardenAt GrowVeg.com we regularly get enquiries from gardeners following the SFG method who want to plan their beds using our Garden Planner. So we have just produced a new Square Foot Gardening mode in the Garden Planner that makes it easy to add one-foot squares of plants as well as using all the other powerful features of the software such as crop rotation, tracking varieties etc. Best of all is that the SFG plants can be part of a larger garden plan that includes more traditional planting layouts and large plants, so there’s the flexibility to combine different methods in a plan of a single garden area.

Square Foot Gardening was revolutionary when it was first invented and it’s still a great system for people who are starting out, have limited space or want a highly organised method to follow. However, you don’t need to follow SFG to benefit from gardening with raised beds and good organisation. There’s a great quote: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” SFG works really well for many situations but it doesn’t fit everything. Despite my reservations I still recommend it as being the right option for many and the book is real-ly easy to follow. The success it brings can often lead people on to discovering the delights of fruit trees, using bar-rels to grow huge crops of potatoes or managing a greenhouse full of high-value crops. It’s a great stepping-stone to the world of growing your own food and that’s why 35 years on it’s still going strong.

How to Grow Vegetables and Fruit in Hanging Basketsby Ann Marie Hendry for GrowVeg.com

Although more commonly used for effusive displays of annual flowers such as petunias and pelargoniums, a hanging basket dangling from a porch or mounted on a wall makes a fun, attractive container for growing vegetables, herbs or fruit. You don’t even need a garden! There are lots of different designs of hanging baskets, including solid-sided ones with an in-built water reservoir, but the most common is made of plas-tic-coated wire suspended from chains and used with a liner. Half-baskets for mounting directly onto walls are also widely available. Our Garden Planner includes icons for the most popular types of hanging baskets to add to your plans. Of

course, you can also use your ingenuity and make your own hanging baskets from household objects you no longer have a use for - think old colanders, leaky buckets, or even food cans!

Edibles to Grow in Hanging BasketsTomatoes are so popular as hanging basket plants that some varieties are bred specifically for this purpose - ‘Tum-bler F1’, for instance. Other compact bush types are also suitable. Tomatoes are greedy feeders and heavy drinkers, so one plant per basket is usually plenty. Pop it in the centre and let it trail down the sides.

Strawberries, particularly diminutive alpine strawberries, are also popular for growing in hanging baskets - the tempting fruits will hang over the edge below the foliage, making them easy to pick. They’ll cope with partial shade too!

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Compact herbs such as parsley, thyme, mint and prostrate forms of rose-mary are ideal for hanging baskets, and they’ll never look untidy if youharvest from them evenly.

Or why not try something a little more unusual in your baskets, such asa cucumber, three or four peppers or chillies, or even half a dozen pea orbean plants so that they trail down the sides? In the top of the basketgrow lettuce, small beetroots, stump-rooted varieties of carrot or summ-er radishes. Combine them with trailing plants such as nasturtiums,which not only look pretty but are edible too.

How to Plant Up a Hanging BasketPreparing a hanging basket for edible plants is no different to preparinga hanging basket for flowers. First, find a bucket or sturdy flowerpot thatis big enough to cup the hanging basket. This will keep it steady and upoff the ground while you work on it. If there are chains attached you mi-ght find that they get in the way, so detach them before you start.

You can buy liners such as those made of coir, recycled paper or plastic, but it’s easy to make your own plain-co-loured liner by turning an old potting soil sack inside out. Press it into the basket so that it fits snugly. You might find you need to cut a few slits from the outside in, to encourage the sack liner to lie flat. Trim off any excess liner sitting above the basket’s rim.

Don’t forget to puncture some holes into the liner at the base to provide drainage, and if you’ll be planting trailing plants such as nas-turtiums or peas through the sides, remem-ber to cut holes for them.

For the growing medium, a commercial potting mix is fine, or alternatively try a rich potting mix of one part leafmould or coir to three parts garden compost or potting soil. You might want to mix in some slow-release

organic fertiliser at the same time to reduce the frequency you will need to feed your plants. Avoid using loam or loam-based potting soils in hanging baskets, as loam is heavy and will put extra strain on your basket chains and supports.

Growing plants in just the top of the basket is easy. Fill the basket with your growing medium and either pop one plant in, dead centre, or space a few around the edge.

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If you’ll be planting through the sides, add your growing medium up to the first tier of cuts. Wrap the stems and leaves of your plants in a cone of plastic (you could use a strip of leftover piece of potting soil sack), push the plant through the slit from the inside out, then remove the cone to use for the next plant. Once that tier is filled, add more of your growing medium so that it sits about 5cm (2in) below the rim of your basket. Add more trailing plants around the edge, taking care to stag-ger them so they are not directly above any plants growing through the sides. You can then add a final bushy plant such as a moss-curled pars-ley in the centre to crown your basket, then top up with your growing medium.

Lovely as they are, it’s important to remember that hanging baskets are difficult environments for plants to grow in. They will be perpetually hungry and thirsty, so water your baskets daily and apply liquid feed regularly. Sink a small plant pot or plastic bottle with holes in the lid into the potting soil to give you something to water into. Watering like this will allow the water to slowly seep out and drip-feed the plants.

Why not give growing fruits or vegetables in hanging baskets a try?

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