Whether
your garden is large or small, you can make better use of every square
inch by using vertical gardening techniques to grow upright crops. Pole
beans typically produce twice as many beans as bush varieties, and the
right trellis can double cucumber yields. Then there are crops, such as
tomatoes, that need some type of support to keep them above damp ground,
where diseases have a heyday. All properly supported plants are easier
to pick from and monitor for pests, plus you’ll get help from bug-eating
birds that use trellises as hunting perches.
How Plants Climb
Plants
that benefit from garden trellises use a variety of methods to cling to
support, including curling tendrils, twining stems or, in the case of
tomatoes, long, ropy branches that form roots in places that touch the
ground.
Curling tendrils produced by peas and cucumber-family
crops will twist around whatever is available, so you have plenty of
versatility when supporting these crops. Tendrils cling to horizontal
and vertical parts of a trellis, so netting woven from biodegradable
string attached to posts often works well. Twining stems spiral around
their support, growing steadily upward until they turn back on
themselves — a growth habit seen in hops, pole beans, Malabar spinach
and yard long beans.
Twining stems have little use for horizontal
lines, so they do best with trellises composed mostly of poles or an
upright fence. (See illustration in the
Image Gallery.)
Tomatoes
like to throw themselves over their support. They must be trained and
tied to an upright trellis, which isn’t as easy as growing them in wire
cages. The larger, more robust the tomato plant, the more you need a
sturdy tomato cage that provides support on all sides.
Temporary or Permanent?
In
my experience, a truly sturdy upright garden trellis must be anchored
by T-stakes or vertical 4-by-4 posts (or 3-inch-diameter saplings from
the woods), sunk 18 inches deep. Installing this semi-permanent garden
structure takes time and muscle. In my garden, the most versatile
trellises are about 8 feet wide, stand 4 to 5 feet high, and are made of
woven wire fencing or a livestock panel attached to two posts. Allowing
4 inches of clearance between the bottom of the fencing and the ground
makes the area easier to weed and cultivate. The advantages of such a
trellis are the ready availability of the structure each spring and the
option to make an attractive permanent feature in the garden.
The
drawback of this or any other long-lasting vertical gardening supports
(like an existing fence) is that it limits rotations to peas, beans,
tomatoes and cucumber-family crops. Temporary trellises, such as bamboo
tipis, give you more flexibility in terms of what you plant where, but
they need to be taken down and stored in a dry place through winter to
keep them from rotting. If you gather trellis parts and bind them
together with string or strips of cloth in the fall and store them over
the winter, they will go up quickly the following season.
Read More Here
Image source: HomeDepot
During the summer there is nothing better than picking fruits and vegetables from your garden and then enjoying them at your dinner table that evening. The taste, freshness and convenience cannot be beat.
But how can you continue to enjoy fresh homegrown produce when they’re not in season? One way is with a root cellar.
It is with the use of root cellars that our ancestors provided nutritious food to their families all year round. Long before refrigerators were in every kitchen, most homes included some sort of root cellar that was designed to preserve nature’s bounty.
Root cellars today can take many forms, from very basic to more complicated. But all of them provide a cool, ventilated, humid and dark space to store fresh food. Foods that do well in a root cellar environment include apples, pears, oranges, potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, garlic, winter squash and nuts.
