Vertical gardening makes it easier to fit more plants onto a limited amount of land, going up rather than out, so we can grow more food on the finite land we have. This is especially useful in the urban and suburban space where block sizes are decreasing. Just recently I was able to put together a vertical garden based on a couple of pallets which I found on the side of the road and drug home in my little car.
The pallets I based my vertical garden on are 800mm deep x 1200mm wide x 130mm thick and consist of 5 boards on the top surface, three boards on the bottom and 9 blocks keeping the two separated. They are a fairly cheaply made pallet and so highly likely to end up on the side of the road, where that can be harvested by those of us who can put such things to use.
To make the vertical garden required two of the above pallets, but only took about half an hour to construct, the process being as follows –
- I stood the pallet up on its end and then using my claw hammer, knocked the two timbers off the face of the pallet which did not line up with the back timbers (ie the second and fourth timbers respectively.
- I laid the pallet down with the top surface against the grass and placed the timbers I had removed against the supporting blocks so that I could nail them back on to form the bottom of each growing area.
- I repeated this action with the other pallet and then placed them back to back so that there were six growing areas. I then screwed on a bracket on each side to keep the pallets together. This increased the stability of the vertical garden.
To use each of the growing areas, they could be filled with pots of herbs and veggies, or each one lined with plastic and filled with growing medium then planted out with plants. The plastic would need to have some drain holes poked in it if this method of growing were to be used.
