Gardening in a small apartment might seem impossible and downright disheartening for those of us who love getting our hands dirty and seeing nature bloom around us. However, there have been recent ideas, techniques and suggestions from gardeners and agricultural experts on various ways to garden in a small space, with vertical gardening being the most popular method.
In vertical gardening, you make use of your walls and fences in your patio or balcony to grow your plants, fruits and even flowers. Today, we’re giving a twist to this very familiar gardening style. Most gardeners use trellises, hanging pots, wall planters, lattices and various sophisticated vertical gardening methods. But if you are on a budget and you do want to garden, i present to you 5 cheap vertical gardening ideas you can create yourself.
- Use your shoe organizer
No, I’m not joking. Your shoe organizer is divided into pouches or holders for your shoes, right? Well, instead of consigning your old shoe organizer to the dumpster, you can upcycle it for your gardening use. Fill up those pouches with reasonable amounts of good fertile soil. Hang the organizer on your bare wall and plant your herbs. There you go, gardening at no extra cost!
- Gutters are great planters
Am I being deliberately sarcastic? No. Do I truly want you to use your rooftop gutters as garden containers? Yes, I definitely do. Isn’t that a little bit weird? Yeah, you do have a point, it is. But its weirdness is surpassed by its underestimated usability. Growing food plants and herbs in your old rain gutters attached to the side of your building creates an eye-appealing arrangement of greenery. It is important to drill holes in the bottom of the gutters before latching them to the wall, so as to provide a good drainage system for your plants.
- Upcycle your plastic bottles
There are lots of things you can do with used plastic bottles and vertical gardening is one of them. Use your knife or any sharp object to create holes in the sides of the bottles. Add your soil and then plant your seed or seedlings. You can hang the bottles in several ways. Some people use clothesline or strings to hang their bottle planters sideways on the wall. Others prefer to secure the bottles to a ledge in an upright position.
- Stack your pots
If you are into container gardening, it stands to reason that you’d have two or more gardening tools. Placing each pot in its own individual location consumes extra space in either your patio or balcony, and that’s space you don’t have. So why not stack them like a pyramid? This is the time to get creative and show your artistic side. Stylishly arrange the pots on top one another, then step back and admire your handiwork.
In her post, Vegetable Gardening for Beginners, Deborah implements the pot-stacking system and it does look classy and efficient.
- Your dresser can be a planter
Ardent followers and readers of this blog would have come across an upcycling post about dressers. The author gave several ideas for transforming your old dresser into a DIY-worthy project. The planter option caught my eye and I think it’s worthy of a second mention.
Take the dresser and pull out its drawers to give a cascading look. Fill them up with soil and go a-planting!
Whatever method you chose, don’t forget to position your garden containers in areas of adequate sunlight. Water regularly and show your plants some love. They live for it.
Now that we’ve had fun exploring these awesome DIY ideas, I hope you try them out and let me know of your progress.
