Tips and Tricks to Start a Vertical Garden

One easy option for a vertical garden is the container style. This simply means that plants in containers - pots, boxes, or planters - are attached to a wall in rows and stacked up one over the other. The most important thing to think about is how you will support or hang the pots and planters. The structure has to be strong enough to hold the weight of the soil, the container, and the plant, itself.

Most of the typical supports employed in vertical gardens are wood posts, metal stakes, and rigid PVC pipes. You can also hang the plants from trellises, tripods, arches, or pergolas.  Some people have even used gutters, wire cages, netting, and 2-liter soda bottles to construct their vertical gardens. The only limit is your imagination.

A pocket garden consists of a section of canvas with rows of "pockets" made out of felt or canvas. The plants are tucked into each pocket across and down. One of the advantages of a pocket style garden is that pre-made pocket planters are readily available for purchase on the web or at your local gardening center. If you're not handy or don't have materials on hand to make your own structure, all you need to do is find a free wall to nail or hang the pockets on. You can also attach the pocket planters to each other and arrange them across a low wall or across and down a tall vertical surface. Pocket planters are a great solution for growing smaller, decorative plants and herbs.

If you have a limited area for a traditional garden plot, you can increase your growing space by gardening vertically. Apartment dwellers and folks with tiny outdoor areas have found that they can even grow their own vegetables in very small spaces.

While this may sound like a drawback if one of the goals is to maximize your space, a smaller growing area can be of great benefit to people with limited mobility who still want to keep up their gardening skills. Plants are easier to reach off the ground, and tasks like fertilizing, pruning, and harvesting are more convenient and less of a workout for your back. People with lots of kids or pets who take over the backyard space also enjoy keeping their garden in a compact area where there is less possibility for the plants to get trampled.

In outdoor, urban areas where smog and heat effect the plants (build-up of heat in densely populated, metropolitan areas), it becomes problematic; vertical gardens mitigate these effects, help to clean the air of pollutants, and offset the carbon footprint of people and fuel emissions. Indoor gardens remove VOCs and other harmful toxins like formaldehyde and benzene and help to improve interior air quality.

Sound can be a problem for people who live in high-traffic areas or noisy apartment buildings. A wall of plants is a natural barrier that not only reduces the effects of constant noise, but it also works as a great solution for disguising and covering up boxy air conditioners and unattractive outdoor structures. 

Vertical gardens protect both interior and exterior walls from the elements. Vegetation on walls helps to cool buildings in the summer and insulate them from the cold in the winter which will reduce costs and save on fuel consumption.
 

Before you get started constructing your garden, it's a good idea to consider what kind of plants will work best in the space you have available. Succulents, vegetables, ferns, and plants with soft, green stems all adapt well to vertical growth. Woody plants like trees, shrubs, and some vines have rigid stems, so they grow parallel to the floor instead of flowing down.

Choose your plants according to how much sun they will get. A basic rule of thumb is to choose all-sun or all-shade plants that have similar growth rates. If you put a slow growing plant next to a one that grows much faster, the aggressive plant will take over and shade out the other one. Also, don't plant bigger plants above smaller ones for the same reason.