What Is a Vertical Garden? CHAPTER 1 I''d like to welcome you to a garden where vegetables, flowers, and fruit all grow, climb, and twine upward to create a beautiful landscape that saves space, requires less effort, produces high yields, and reduces pest and disease problems. Whether your goal is armloads of flowers, a bountiful vegetable garden, or a productive fruit harvest, I''ll show you how narrow strips of soil, bare walls, and simple trellises and arches can be transformed into grow-up or grow-down gardens with just a few inexpensive supplies or purchased planters. I''ve been testing gardening methods in my own 20-acre garden at Cedaridge Farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for 20 years, and I want you to discover the same delights and benefits of vertical gardening that I''m enjoying. Vertical gardening is an innovative, effortless, and highly productive growing system that uses bottom-up and top-down supports for a wide variety of plants in both small and large garden spaces. There are hundreds of varieties of vegetables, fruits, and flowers that are perfect for growing up freestanding and wall-mounted supports and in beds or containers. Best of all, vertical gardening guarantees a better result from the day your trowel hits your soil--by shrinking the amount of garden space needed and reducing the work needed to prepare new beds. Chores like weeding, watering, fertilizing, and controlling pests and diseases are reduced considerably, while yields are increased, especially with vegetables like beans and tomatoes. A vining pole bean will outyield a bush bean tenfold.

Moreover, a vining vegetable is capable of continuous yields--the more you pick, the more the plant forms new flowers and fruit to prolong the harvest. A bush variety, by contrast, will exhaust itself within 2 to 3 weeks. A Japanese wisteria vine twines upward through the canopy of this small- scale replica of Monet''s bridge. The long flower clusters offer an intimate and fragrant resting spot while viewing the water garden at Cedaridge Farm. With vertical gardening methods, you''ll also discover that many ground- level plants pair beautifully with climbing plants, so you can combine different types of plants to create a lush curtain of flowers, foliage, and bounty. With a mix of do-it-yourself and commercially available string supports, trellises, pergolas, raised beds, Skyscraper Garden trellises, and Topsy-Turvy planters, vertical gardening saves a lot of time and work, lessens backbreaking tasks, makes harvesting easier, and is perfect for any size space, from a patio container and a 1 x 4-foot strip of soil to a landscape trellis and the entire side of a building. LAYING THE GROUNDWORK I first encountered a successful no-dig garden at the Good Gardeners Association in Hertfordshire, England. I visited the home of the group''s founder, the late Dr.

W. E. Shewell-Cooper, in 1970, when I went to interview him for an article in Horticulture magazine. On my return to the United States, I also discovered The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, which was one of the first books that advocated a system of no-dig gardening through in situ (in place) composting. Stout explained how she created planting beds by putting down newspapers to suffocate existing weeds and grass; piling on layers of organic waste, such as spoiled hay and kitchen scraps, as mulch to decompose; and then planting directly into this compost. This system of gardening has appealed to many people during the past 40 years, even though its focus has been gardening horizontally. Many no-dig plots based on Ruth Stout''s book have been established in public demonstration gardens, including one maintained by the ECHO Foundation (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) near Fort Myers, Florida. The foundation began its first no-dig garden in 1981, which remained in continuous production for years as a vegetable garden in the middle of what had been a lawn.

It was never plowed, cultivated, spaded, or hoed. Around the same time, engineer-turned-author Mel Bartholomew introduced his own concept in his book Square Foot Gardening, which promoted raised beds and intensively planted crops that allowed gardeners to grow more in less space. Mel has convinced millions of gardeners around the world to switch to easy no-dig raised beds. And then along came Patricia Lanza with her blockbuster book Lasagna Gardening. After struggling to amend the soil in her gardens, she, too, realized that layering compostable ingredients was the best way to start new garden beds, and she''s been growing flowers, vegetables, and herbs for years in her "lasagna" layers. For the past couple of decades, I''ve studied, tried, and implemented gardening systems that produce better results in less space with less work. Many no-dig methods were developed specifically for gardening horizontally, but I''ve found that these same no-dig techniques are even better suited to vertical gardening. With vertical gardening, plants require much less space than plants that grow horizontally, so those same layering techniques are even more efficient when used in conjunction with the small-footprint beds I recommend.

While most no-dig systems suggest that a 6-inch depth of fertile soil is adequate, I prefer a soil depth of 6 to 12 inches in a raised planting bed, because vining plants generally have more vigorous root systems than dwarf plants or plants grown horizontally. Plants grown in 6 to 12 inches of fertile soil respond magnificently to that extra soil depth by delivering maximum yields. THE BENEFITS OF GROWING VERTICALLY If you''ve gardened in long, horizontal beds for even a single growing season, you''ve probably thought to yourself, "There has to be a better way." Well, you''re right--there is a better way. Vertical gardening offers many advantages over horizontal growing. Smaller beds to prepare and maintain. When growing plants with a vertical habit, you''ll need a bed only as large as the root systems of those plants-- one that''s much smaller than a traditional bed. When you plant horizontally, you tend to have narrow rows of plants and wide swaths of soil between them.

It''s those wide swaths that drink up much of the water, send up innumerable weeds, and consume the nutrients needed by your plants. With vertical gardening, you prepare only small spots or strips of fertile soil--just enough to give plants a nutritious base from which to climb up supports. These vertical garden beds require less compost, fertilizer, and water, and only a few bucketfuls of mulch or a little black plastic to control weeds. Compost goes further when you cut back on bed space, so you won''t need to buy, generate, or use as much compost in order to amend your soil each season. And whether you plan to water with a watering can or use a drip irrigation system, you''ll find that watering your small plots of soil is a cinch, and your drip hose can be short. A simple vertical garden is perfect for a paved or soil surface, 2 feet wide x 4 feet long, with room for four vining plants such as a tomato, cucumber, climbing spinach, and pole bean. I''m an advocate of no-dig beds, because I''ve seen the results others have achieved, in addition to my own successes. You can easily create a no-dig bed by spreading homemade or store-bought compost onto bare soil--or onto a layer of newspapers to kill surface weeds or turfgrass--and leveling the new bed with a rake.

Spreading compostable layers on top of your newspaper weed barrier will create a fluffy, nutrient-rich planting bed (the method called in situ or sheet composting). To compost in situ, I make sure my newspaper layer is at least 15 pages thick and that the edges overlap like the scales of a fish. This excludes light from the ground beneath, killing grass and weeds. On top of this, I generally place a 6-inch layer of grass clippings, a 6-inch layer of shredded leaves (I use a lawn mower to shred them), and then a layer of kitchen waste (often including banana peels, eggshells, fish bones, and potato skins). This stack is then topped off by a 1/2-inch layer of wood ashes. Other good composting ingredients include well-rotted animal manure (like cow and horse), sawdust, shredded newspapers, pine needles, and hay. Hold the sides of this in-situ compost bed in place with boards, landscape ties, or even stones or bricks. Skyscraper structures can be assembled above a raised bed to create a freestanding unit, ready for edible vines such as pole beans and indeterminate tomatoes or flowering vines such as morning glories and climbing nasturtiums.

Do-it-yourself supports and trellises. While vertical gardening depends on a variety of supports and trellises, you''ll find that it''s easy to make your own. I make many of my own trellises from bamboo canes that I grow myself, or from pencil-straight pussy willow stems. It''s simple to take canes or willow stakes and space them 1 foot apart to make posts, and use thinner, more pliable canes threaded through them horizontally to make strong, good-looking trellises. You''ll see lots of examples of homemade trellises in the photographs in this book. Of course, ready-made trellises are available from garden centers, large hardware stores, and even big-box discount stores. Sturdy metal ones are suited for heavier vines, like melons and winter squash. In this book, you''ll also discover the Skyscraper Garden trellis, a post-and-netting support I designed specifically for growing vegetables and flowers vertically.

Skyscraper Garden trellises can be freestanding or wall-mounted and can be grouped in raised beds to create an efficient, highly productive, and attractive gardening space. At Cedaridge Farm, I''ve created long r.