VERTICAL GARDENING TIPS & IDEAS: Why and how to add VERTICAL SPACE to your garden in ANY SPACE

If you want to grow more food in less space, keep your garden healthier, and add some serious beauty to the whole thing, then you got to start growing vertically. Today, I'm giving you a master class on vertical gardening so you know exactly which plants climb best and what trellises and vertical supports will get them there. And here's the fun part. By the end of this video, you're going to know exactly how to match plants to the right vertical supports so that you start planting like a gardening pro. So here's why you got to start vertical gardening number one. It saves space. There are so many plants in the vegetable garden that love to sprawl and vine and climb and take over pretty much everything. But if you add a vertical support in the garden, that vining, sprawling plant can grow up instead of out, making room for so many other plants in your precious raised bed space. The second reason to vertical garden is it adds airflow, and airflow is critical to plant health. So all the leaves on these plants, all your vegetable plants, they're very prone to disease, to fungus, and to pests. So all the plants that are growing so dynamically in the vegetable garden, all those leaves and fruit and flowers, they tend to layer upon one another. And every time there's a layer, there's a heightened chance for disease, for fungus, and for pests. But when you grow on a vertical support, you spread all that growth out. The leaves, the flowers, the fruit, they all have a place to hang and have their own space. That means there's going to be so much more air flowing around all your plants, so there will be a lot less pests, hardly any disease, and no filus. The third reason you should start vertical gardening is easier harvesting. Instead of being on your hands and knees or digging through your beds for the harvest, you're just simply going to walk into your garden space and pick. A key to kitchen garden success is accessibility. You need to be able to get in and out of your garden right before dinner, right before you're prepping a meal. And if you've got to dig and search and work hard to get to your food, chances are you're going to skim, skip, harvesting it when it's most ripe. But when it's growing vertically, you just walk outside, grab a few things, and you're back inside in no time. And last but not least, the fourth reason is it is so incredibly beautiful. When I first started gardening, all my gardening was just in the ground. No supports, no vertical interest, just everything down below. And as soon as I started Adding trellises to my garden space, it literally up leveled my game. So every time I look into my garden, it looks so beautiful, even when there's hardly anything growing yet it adds this vertical heightened interest to the garden. So even in the middle of winter, the garden looks beautiful, it looks full. But there's nothing that compares to arch trellises, panel trellises, obelisk trellises covered in vines in the middle of the summer. You are literally creating your own garden dreamland when you add vertical supports off me on this one. So now that I've convinced you that vertical gardening is definitely worth it, let's talk about the plants that love to grow up. So in the cool season, the best vertical growing vegetables are sugar snap peas and fava beans. I've got both of these growing on my arch right now. You can see the fava beans, the sugar snap peas, they're slowly making their way up the arch. Now, in the warm season, there's a lot more things you can grow because these plants, they love to vine. So indeterminate tomatoes, you can't see them yet, but I've actually got them tucked here right beside my arch trellis. We pass frost, so these are going to start to climb in no time. I have a whole set of videos all about growing tomatoes on an arch trellis, if you want to check that out after this video. So vining tomatoes, they do great on a trellis. So do cucumbers and pole beans. Beyond cucumbers, there's a couple of other plants in the squash plant family that will grow well on a trellis. Believe it or not, you can train a zucchini or a squash to grow up a trellis. There's also things like butternut squashes and pumpkins that grow great on a trellis. And then the infamous loofah gourd looks amazing covering an arch with all these huge loofah gourds hanging off them. Then in the hottest part of the year, if you live in a place where the temps get into the 90s in the middle of the summer, you can still grow vertically. Tomatillos love to grow on an arch trellis, Armenian cucumbers, yard long beans. Then you can also grow this incredibly nutritious green called Malabar spinach. And get this, you can even grow the vines of a sweet potato. So let your sweet potato do its thing underground and then grow the sweet potato greens over a trellis. It's pretty magical when you're sweating it out on a 100 degree day in the middle of the summit. Now, in my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, I outlined the three key types of trellises, and I'm going to show you what all of here. So starting off with probably the most popular kind of trellis is the obelisk. Now, you're probably familiar with, like, a tomato cage or maybe some bamboo stakes all made into a teepee. Well, those are kind of the rough versions of a fancier obelisk trellis. You want to think of an obelisk like a tower, and a lot of the designs are going to start wider at the bottom and then narrow at the top. Me, personally, I prefer obelisks that stay the same width all the way up, because when they come together at a point at the top of the obelisk, you really lose all that extra growing space that you worked so hard to get with the trellis in the first place. So I would prioritize getting a trellis that's less like a teepee and more like a tower. You want to think same width all the way from the bottom to the top. The best things to grow on an obelisk trellis are going to be your smaller vining plants. So things don't have a ton of weight or a ton of plant mass. So you want to prioritize things like sweet peas, sugar snap peas, fava beans, and then pole beans are great in the summer. And then also the smaller tomatoes. So not a huge, big vining tomato, but an indeterminate tomato could work on this as well. All right, next up is the panel trellis. I love panel trellises because they give you so much growing room in a very small space. So the first way I love using panels is along a fence line or a border garden. So this would be a garden you can only access from, like, three, not the back side. So by adding a panel trellis to the back of that garden, you've literally, like, doubled your growing space, because you can grow all the big plants up the back of the garden and then have the small ones in front. Another way you can use panel trellises is down the middle of a bed. So when you add this to the middle of a wide bed that you can access from all sides, you've again doubled, probably, like, more than double quadrupled your growing space, because you can plant on either side of that panel and grow up on both sides. Couple things to keep in mind. You generally want your panel to be at least foot tall. These we sunk into the ground quite a bit, but these are six feet tall by nature. You want Them to be that tall just so they can actually hold all the plants that are going to be growing up them. And then you want to be sure that you've got a grid like structure in the middle. You want to have enough support on this panel so that you're not having to do a lot of work to keep your plants attached to that panel trellis. Some of my favorite things to grow up a panel would be cucumbers. Also peas work great against a panel trellis. And then some of the best flowers are things like clematis. I'm actually growing raspberries and blackberries along this panel trellis here at the back of my garden. So many possibilities. Finally, there's the arch trellis, definitely my favorite. So arch trellises are the ones that can do heavy duty lifting. This is the perfect trellis for plants that grow really big and for a very long time. Because these arches, they're going to support a plant from this side of the arch all the way to the other side. So you don't just have six feet tall, you have another three or four feet tall to go across and then you can go back down the other side of the arch. So save room on your arch trellises for your biggest plants. Now, a couple things to keep in mind. When it comes to the arch trellis in general, you want your trellis to run north, south, south. This way it gets light on all your plants and doesn't end up shading the garden as the sun rises and falls throughout each and every day. But my arch trellises, they're running east and west, so you can see that it works either way. You also want to be sure that your arch trellis is at least 3 to 4ft wide because you need a pathway for you to get in between the arch so you can plant and pick all season long. Another thing I've seen a lot of people do online that I definitely wouldn't try and is putting an arch trellis across the entirety of a raised bed. So there's some products online like this and I've also seen people kind of trying to recreate the arch trellis magic, but I have to say it's a miss. So when you put an arch trellis the long ways in your raised bed, going from one end to the other, you're going to be shading all the inside of your raised bed. And that is prime property for planting some sun hungry plants. So instead of doing that, I would add another bed and then use the arch trellis to connect them both rather than adding an arch trellis which is going to shade those plants all season long, especially when the vining plants have completely covered the trellis. My favorite plants for growing on an arch trellis are the big guys. Of course I love to grow indeterminate tomatoes, cucumbers, pole beans are great. We can also do squash, melon, luffe, gourd and definitely some nasturtium and passion flower. I double dare you to get out there and add one or two trellises so you can start vertically gardening in your own space this season and see if it doesn't double your space, double your harvest and double your fun in the garden this year. 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