The Modern Victory Garden

There are many of us who have limited space availability for food production gardening and yet still manage to produce a tremendous amount of our own food supply.   This post is part of a blog series devoted to exploring the many techniques available to optimize food production gardening.   There are quite a few topics that relate to this pursuit - including (among others):

• Crop Selection
• Intensive Planting Practices
• Season Extension
• Soil Management & Fertility

Focusing on Crop Selection kicked off the blog series.   Now we are exploring Intensive Planting Practices.    Intensive planting techniques generally include a combination of planting in raised beds (either double dug or otherwise greatly amended and improved), closely spaced planting, intercropping and succession planting, and the use of vertical growing techniques – all for the purpose of producing the same amount of food in approximately 20% of the space used by traditional row gardening practices.   To date, we have discussed the topics of Raised Beds, Closely Spaced Planting, and Intercropping & Succession Planting.   This week we will wrap up the four-part segment on intensive planting techniques by discussing the practice of vertical growing.         

Vertical Growing –                            

Growing a traditional row garden is quite linear.   When you make the move to raised beds using within-row spacing in all directions (closely spaced planting techniques) you introduce a second dimension to your food production garden.   To really kick up the production level you can add a third dimension – vertical growing.       

Consider this … if you install a vertical support structure that is 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide on one edge of a 4-foot by 4-foot section of garden bed you just increased the growing area of that section of bed by 150 percent!   The vertical plane provides 24 square feet of growing area and the horizontal garden bed provides 16 square feet.   Combined you now have 40 square feet of growing area.    All of this increase in growing room is in the same footprint of space you had already committed to the growing bed.   By growing crops that will climb on a vertical support structure, you can save space in the traditional garden bed area for plants that cannot be grown vertically.                                    

Growing crops vertically not only saves space but it can make harvesting crops much simpler because they are easier to see and require less stooping and squatting to reach.   Getting crops off the ground can also help reduce pest infestations too.                        

There are many different kinds of vertical support structures available to choose from.   The simplest are poles or branches pushed into the dirt with plants surrounding them or a teepee-like structure made out of poles.   More elaborate systems include A-frames, board frames that are screwed together, electrical conduit (metal or PVC), a fence if one is near a garden bed, traditional trellis lattices, and many of these types of supports also use string or netting attached to the framework.   Vertical supports also include ladders, towers, and stacked cages commonly used for crops like tomatoes to hold the plants vertically - keeping them from sprawling on the ground.                                                                  

All of these are perfectly good alternatives so long as it is mechanically strong enough to hold up fully loaded with mature plants if a wind kicks up and are reasonably tall enough to handle the types of plants you intend to grow.        

Beyond those basic issues, what you choose is purely a matter of personal aesthetics, availability of materials, and your interest and skill level in constructing garden structures.   I generally use metal conduit pipe to create my trellis supports.   My husband is an electrician (although he has not worked in that field for many years) and as a consequence is quite comfortable using a conduit bender to bend metal conduit which is then connected in the center with a connector fitting to create a metal frame that I then attach nylon netting to (using tie wraps!).   They are pushed firmly into the ground so that they are well anchored and level.   The result are grow supports that are approximately 4 feet wide by 6 feet tall.    Here is a series of these supports that were installed on a 2-foot wide bed specially designed just for vertical growing.                    

The climbing plants are usually seeded or transplanted directly below the support structure so that they may grow up and easily grab on to (or be woven into) the support system.                           

While you can install these trellis support structures on a wider bed, I have found that it is very difficult to pick crops reaching across 4 feet of bed area to get at the front section.   I personally prefer to construct 2-foot wide beds that have the grow support structures running along the length.   It is much easier to pick both sides of the vertical grow supports when the grow bed is narrower.   I use approximately 1-foot of the growing area to plant the climbing crops and then use the remaining 1-foot width to plant other items.   Here is a picture of a bed that has carrots growing in the front half of the narrow grow bed and vertical crops in the back half.      

To avoid problems with crops on vertical support structures shading out other parts of the garden, it is best to construct taller vertical supports on the north side of raised beds if at all possible.                               

I like to use trellis supports for peas, cucumbers, pole beans, runner beans, and I use other types of vertical supports for tomatoes and peppers (tomato ladders and stacked cages).   I could use trellis supports for other melon and squash plantings too but have personally found it easier to just find an area of garden they can run in and not fuss with slings or other methods to ensure heavier fruits (such as melons) do not slip from their vine and fall to a bad end from some height.                       

Do you use vertical growing in your garden and if so, what kinds of structures do you like to use?