Tower garden is smart idea for your tiny space

Want a farm but don’t have the space? Establishing tower gardens is the solution. Tower gardens use vertical space unlike planting horizontally in conventional farm-setting.

Tower garden requires as little as 10 per cent of the land and water traditional growing methods use. It is suitable for open small spaces, such as balconies, patios, rooftops, even your kitchen, provided you use growing lights.

What you need

The garden can be constructed using old planters, recycled containers, bits of fencing or scraps of PVC pipes. Anything that can create a vertical space for holding dirt and rooting plants can probably be used for building a tower garden.

Old tires stack together vertically and filled with soil can form a simple homemade tower garden for growing potatoes. Roll a length of chicken wire into a tube and secure it. Set the tube upright and stake it to the ground. Fill the tube with soil. Use straw to prevent the soil from escaping through the chicken wire. Plant seed potatoes as you fill it or insert lettuce seedlings or any other through the chicken wire.

A double-walled, spiral-shaped frame is made using hardware cloth. The double-wall is filled with decorative gravel. Plants are grown in the interior of the spiral. The whole concept can take less than an hour, that means you can create your own garden tower on any given day, even on a weekday, after coming home from work.

The positive side

You can grow food in your towered gardening structure and easily access it, as it will just be a few steps away from your kitchen.

If you live in a place that has cold or rainy weather, you can even set up your vertical garden indoors. You will just need to install special lights that will serve as artificial sunlight to help your plants grow. 

What can you grow in a tower garden? We all know that we should be eating healthier and including more fruits and vegetables in our daily diets. However, this can sometimes be difficult to do. Many people do not have time to run out to the store to pick up fresh groceries, so they just end up ordering something in. Produce in the grocery stores are often sprayed with pesticides and other chemicals to ensure that they grow fast. A towered gardening unit is great because you have the opportunity to grow your own fresh food, without the use of pesticides. You can grow kales, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries, cucumbers and pepper among other crops based on your taste and preferences.

Identify the space

Choose the space where you would like to set the garden. The space could be indoors or outdoors depending on what is available. Because it uses soil, the garden should preferably be located outdoors because the pots need to be fixed into the ground.

Once the preferred spot is identified, you can now place your first planter. Start with the largest of your planters because this forms the base which will support the weight of all the others. Add the soil to the base planter to three quarters.

Start planting the vegetables of choice around the perimetre of the largest planter. Add the next tower by placing the medium-sized planter on top of the soil of the base planter. Carefully place it so that it is not centered. Add planting soil and plant the vegetables or herbs around the planter. Repeat the exercise up to the desired level.