Starting a garden is expensive. There’s all the compost you have to buy and the pots, and the costs soon mount up. Plus there aren’t really many good solutions for small space and vertical gardening that don’t cost the absolute earth.
Since this year has been about experimentation I’ve been trying out some ideas I found online. See what works and then refine and improve the ideas for next year.
The ‘shoe holder’ plant wall is the one that I reckon has the most promise. It’s soon going to contain 16 lovely heads of cut and come again lettuces. It uses space on the door to an outdoor toilet that we use for storage. I can’t practically put pots in front of the door because of access and it doesn’t get much sun down there. But the front of the door higher up gets lots of sun.
And then there’s the runner beans and peas growing in milk bottles and juice cartons. Because they like sending their roots deep, right? Window boxes seem like a waste for growing peas and beans in, they’re not quite tall enough and always wastefully wide. Once they’ve started hanging onto the net they won’t fall over.
Lastly there’s the question of what to do with the endless amounts of fizzy water bottles that we generate. We go through a fair amount of this stuff and it seemed silly to keep throwing the bottles away.
So I found a guy who is working on sustainable methods of growing for third world countries, and came up with the vertical bottle growing method. The bottles become a greenhouse for each individual plant and also an irrigation method. I’m slowly adding to it a bottle at a time, but it does seem to be working. (Actually I have quite a few bottles stashed in the shed that I need to cut to shape… I should do that.)
They’re just tied to a drilled pallet, plenty of space to go…
