Vertical Gardening

My garden

Weather permitting, I'm about to plant my outdoor garden next week. I've been turning the soil over and fertilizing with fresh compost. Compared to aquaponic gardening, all the tilling and weeding is extra work. By Vermont standards, it's still early in the season. I feel fortunate to have started before the weeds really start growing. Hopefully, I'll fix my garden fence before the neighbors' cows escape and find the fresh hay mulch I put down in between the rows.

The garden rows are in great shape now, but the adjacent strawberry bed is overcrowded with baby runners.

freshly weeded strawberry bed

Since I didn't weed it enough late last summer, the grass took over and I had to weed it all over again. I wanted to rescue my old strawberry bed, but all the weeding is getting tiresome. Surely, there must be a simpler way to get a few quarts of berries, right?

April strawberry

Looking for the easy way out, I found this simple design to build a wooden pallet vertical garden, which I plan to fill with hay and transplant the baby strawberry runners. I've got an extra bale of hay, so I might try just stuffing the pallet with hay and planting the strawberries directly into it. They're not called straw-berries for nothing, right? Hay is a good source of nitrogen and withholds moisture, so it's worth a try. Besides, a pallet has a tiny footprint of only four feet of space. I'm going to support it on the bottom with feet so it can be easily moved, like this one.

Vertical pallet garden with feet

Since gardening is scalable, you can put a vertical pallet garden right on a patio, deck, rooftop, or someplace where you might not ordinarily consider gardening. It can maximize overall plant yield, which is a huge benefit. Some varieties prefer to be grown vertically, like heirloom tomatoes. They naturally like to sprawl, as opposed to the bush tomato types. Since the plants are off the ground, the system is less susceptible to pests, and there is less bending over to take care of the garden. Besides requiring less soil, I've read that vertical gardens also require less water, which is another huge benefit. Best of all, though, I won't have to do as much weeding!

Australian Aquaponic guru, Murray Hallam, demonstrates a few options and considerations about how to make your own Aquaponics vertical strawberry tower.

Murray Hallam next to strawberry tower

Because my aquaponics systems are centered around growing vegetables for year-round indoor/outdoor production, I've opted not to grow strawberries in my systems, but I do plan have a vertical system built soon.

I've been working on a prototype for a vertical mini-Aquaponic system, and am intrigued with this Youtube video below. I found a couple of 5 gallon water jugs and plan to replicate this design. With a lightweight (portable) pvc pipe for the frame, a 5 gallon water jug, a couple of air pumps, aquarium tubing, some gravel, and some recycled plastic bottles, this inexpensive system can get you started with aquaponics.

The hole in the middle of the growbed is used to feed the fish, but also allows access for a siphon tube to clean waste solids from the bottom of the tank. I think this 5 gallon system would be too small for most species of fish, but might work well with a betta (Siamese fighting fish), guppies, or for a shrimp or crayfish tank. Stay tuned!