Vertical Gardens

So you don’t have a big garden footprint.  No space to build and plant a box big enough to be worthwhile?  Well, think vertically!  This week on In the Garden with UC Master Gardeners, our Master Gardener hosts Katrina Kirkeby and Teena Spindler discuss all the possibilities to get plantings to grow in a very small space.  Get strawberries off the ground away from those slugs! Cover your fence with pots secured with zip ties! Flowers, herbs, edibles, succulents … just about anything short of trees, of course, can work.  Do’s and don’ts and how-to’s galore!  Tune in and grow up!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to In the Garden with Master Gardeners with UCCE Master Gardeners Tina Spindler and Katrina Kirkabee. And today we're going to be talking about vertical gardens. Tina, tell us about vertical gardens.

SPEAKER_03 0:38

Yeah, I think that this is really a topic that is going to be coming more and more popular. I've been seeing a lot more vertical garden systems both online and at some of our local nurseries. And I think it's for a couple of reasons. More and more of us are living in smaller and smaller places, and we're perhaps not having too much garden space anymore. We might live in an apartment or a townhome and just have a patio or a balcony, and yet people are still really interested in maybe growing a little bit of their own food, and so they're trying to figure out how they can do that. Or maybe they just want to have a little bit of you know green or colorful plants, but they just don't have a lot of space. So when you see these vertical gardening systems, that gives you an option.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

I think it sounds like such a wonderful idea. It brings so much to somebody who doesn't have the room. And it's beautiful. They're absolutely beautiful, Tina.

SPEAKER_03 1:43

Yeah, I don't know if you've seen, I've even seen a couple of stores that are doing indoor vertical garden walls with, you know, succulents and or indoor house plants. And it's really, really cool. There's a home store in South Coast Plaza that has this amazing green vertical wall behind its uh cash register checkout area, and it's quite stunning.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

You know, Tina, maybe everybody doesn't know what you're talking we're talking about when we talk about vertical gardening. What are we talking about?

SPEAKER_03 2:14

That's a good point. I'm assuming everybody knows, and let's explain a little bit more what that means. Well, usually when we plant things, we plant them in the ground. That's the original way to plant things, is in the ground. The other way that we plant things is in containers, in a pot. Well, most of us have a limited amount of space where we can put pots, but we have kind of a lot of space between the ground and say the sky, right? If we had the ability to stack pots up on a pole, for instance, we could keep planting and planting and planting until we couldn't reach anymore without getting a ladder. So that's kind of the concept. The concept is to create a garden that goes up rather than spreads out horizontally. And so the reasons that you want to do that obviously are, as we just said, is because you don't have a lot of space. You don't have a lot of horizontal space. But most of us have some walls, right? On the outside of our house, on our patio, we have these walls that go up one or two stories. So if we could figure out a way to plant up against those walls, we could plant a lot more stuff.

SPEAKER_01 3:32

How exciting. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more of vertical guard systems. Tell us how do you get them? Where do you get them? What do you do?

SPEAKER_03 3:41

Well, there's a whole lot of systems out there. Um, but before I go into that, I I forgot to mention a couple other reasons that you might want to do vertical gardening in addition to just wanting or needing more space, and that is think about gardening. If you're gardening in the ground, uh I don't know how many pairs of pants you have that have holes in the knees, but I have a ton of pants that have holes in the knees because I'm forever crawling around on the gar on the ground. Yeah, and how about your back after you've been out in the garden all day, you know, bending over. So think about it. If you could just stand up and look at a wall where there were some planters, how fun would that be? You know? Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 4:23

And you know, it's also beautiful. It is like artwork on your walls. Absolutely. Sometimes on the inside you have pictures, on the outside you could have your vertical garden, and it's just absolutely gorgeous. It is, it's so pretty.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

And think about the ease of taking care of it if you were just standing up while you gardened instead of always crawling around on your knees. And um also, if you don't have a lot of places that have sun, because think about it, you know, when your pots are down at ground level, there might be a wall that's blocking the sun, maybe even just a patio table that's blocking the sun. But there's usually a wall on your patio that gets full sun, right? I mean, generally one of your walls is facing the sun, and if you could plant up along that wall, you could plant things that need sun, which are most of our edibles need six to eight hours of sun, and also most of our blooming flowers need, you know, there are some shade flowers, but a lot of flowers, you know, need a good six to eight hours of sun. And I know a lot of people who live in apartments and condos really miss having those plants that you know are very bright and require sun. So vertical gardens also give you an opportunity to find your sunny wall and make the most out of it.

SPEAKER_01 5:48

Oh, this has sounded exciting.

SPEAKER_03 5:50

So let's talk now about how you do it, right? Well, you you can't just you know take a piece of bubblegum and stick it on a plant and smash it on the wall. That's that's not gonna not gonna work too well. So uh there are a lot of companies that are really getting into this vertical gardening system production in a big way. And one of the easiest things to do is to just Google vertical garden systems, and you'll see all sorts of choices pop up. But let's just talk about a couple that I've seen and had experience with, and uh, you've been out at the great park, right, Katrina? Oh, yeah, sure have. Yeah, the demonstration garden at the farm and food lab.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Oh, that is such an exciting place to go. Okay, little segue here. Tina, tell us a little bit about that. Sure.

SPEAKER_03 6:38

Um, the farm and food lab at the Orange County Great Park is a one and a half acre demonstration garden, and there's a dozen or so raised beds out there that each have a little garden theme, like pizza garden and fruit salad garden and so forth. And then there's also fun things like a chicken coop and a worm bin and tons and tons of fruit trees that we espalier and grow, and this is another good thing to do in small spaces, is to grow your fruit trees flat against a wall. That's called espaliering. And one of the other exhibits that out is out there is the first vertical garden system I ever saw. That was six years ago, five years ago probably, and it was actually a commercial, or it is actually a commercial gardening system, so it's a very sturdy, and what it is, is it's these uh round plastic planters, they're kind of scalloped around the edges, and you stack them one on top of the other. You put a fence post, you know the posts that you use on a chain link fence, those metal posts. Well, you put one of those in the ground and then you stack these, there's a hole in the center of these pots, and you just slide them over that pole, fill the bottom one with soil, slide the next one on top, fill it with soil, and so on, until we have six of these stacked, and we plant strawberries in them, and you've seen them. And the the it's so funny because you see kids and parents, and we ask people not to pick the food that grows out there because we want visitors to be able to see it. But oh my goodness, it's almost impossible for the kids with these strawberries at eye level.

SPEAKER_02 8:22

I just love watching them sneak a strawberry every now and again. It's like in a candy store, it's like right mouth and eye level. It's just too too hard. So I never say anything if one of them does that. But you know, they hold their little hands and they try to put their hands behind their back, and it's so tippy.

SPEAKER_03 8:39

And you know, for them, the the thrill that they get of having that strawberry is is well worth the loss of that that one little strawberry. But anyway, it's an extremely effective way to grow strawberries because strawberries, as you know, like great drainage, right? They don't like their roots to be sitting in water. And of course, when you're stacking these planters, the water's gonna drain right through, so they're never sitting in water. And we use a drip system to irrigate them. So it's a great, great way to get a lot of plants in a really small space because those that one tower stack of those vertical planters takes up about an 18-inch by 18-inch square. So a foot and a half by a foot and a half. And if and you know in your garden, how many strawberry plants could you get in a foot and a half square? Not that many. Maybe four, yeah. If we're lucky, yeah. So you could put maybe four strawberry plants in that space, one in each corner. Right. Well, because these pots are scalloped, I think we get six plants, maybe it's only five, but we get around the edge of this planter, we get five or six plants, and then we stack them six deep. So we have maybe thirty-six plants in a one and a half by one and a half foot footprint.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

Amazing.

SPEAKER_03 10:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Amazing.

SPEAKER_03 10:05

So that is a great way to, you know, grow food. Capitalize on your space. Exactly. And for urban farmers, this may be you know what urban farmers are going to go to more and more as we try to have a little bit of food production in our urban areas where we don't have a lot of land. Uh, you could also grow lettuce in these same uh towers. I mean, my goodness, a family could never eat that much lettuce. You know, 36 lettuce plants. It would you could feed your whole block probably with uh with lettuce. Herbs. Herbs, yeah. Um generally speaking, in a lot of urban garden systems, you need to stick to smaller plants, uh, not you know, trying to grow a tree, obviously, and that kind of system would not work very well. But we'll talk about that a little bit more later. Uh but let's keep talking about um some other uh vertical garden systems. Have have you seen any in your in your adventures in the gardening world?

SPEAKER_01 11:11

Well, you know, we don't I have something I did at home that is not really purchased for vertical gardening, but I have a flower bed or a vegetable garden, and it's uh it's there's a retaining wall. And in my retaining wall, there is stacked paving stones. And in in the holes of the paving stones, I have put succulents. So it's about four feet high and about 30, 40 feet long.

SPEAKER_03 11:38

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

And it is cascading with succulents right now because every hole in there has a succulent. So my goal is at one point in time it is going to be covered and you won't see the wall anymore.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

That will be beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 11:52

And it's really pretty. You know, another master gardener suggested doing it, and I start doing it, and when they grow a little bit, I've been putting them in another hole, and it's just stunning. You know, people walk around the corner and see a four-foot-high wall of succulents, and it's easy to take care of. I mean, there's just no work. I don't get any fruit from them or anything, but or vegetables from them, but it's just a pretty wall, and it's so low maintenance.

SPEAKER_03 12:23

And this is the the stacking, retaining wall paver material that you can buy at any big box retailer, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:31

Yeah, I got a big box retailer when we needed to, you know, I live on a slope, so we needed to make so the garden didn't want to be on the slope. I needed to make raise it up about four feet and fill it in. Uh-huh. And we use those stacking stones that we got at a big box retailer. And we made it, and for years I had flowers draping over it.

SPEAKER_03 12:49

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

And then when she made that comment about succulents, I start putting succulents in it, and it's just beautiful. And what a great way to save water, too, by using succulents. Yeah, I don't water it that often. I mean, it does need to be watered, but not that often. I just take a hose and spray it, and every so often I'll when they're growing, I trim them back and fill in the other spaces. But it is beautiful. And it doesn't take up any extra space. That wall was there to start with. Yeah. And now I have a 40-foot wall of succulents.

SPEAKER_03 13:19

That's that's fabulous.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

And just was easy to do, it's easy to maintain. I just once in a while go hose my wall.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:27

And it's not anything I have to do on a regular basis, and they can be deprived a little bit and they still survive. Yeah. It's just nice. It's pretty.

SPEAKER_03 13:34

It is pretty. And succulents are a great uh plant material to use in a vertical garden if you want something decorative. Uh, have you ever seen those fabric pouches that nurseries are now selling that you hang on walls? Yes. And a lot of them put succulents in those as well, and they have layers of these pouches. They're made out of a some kind of a porous, really thick, feels, looks kind of like super thick felt. I don't know what it actually is. Um, and they usually just have little uh rings, holes on the edges of them that you can hook over a nail or a hook on your wall, and then you've got this hanging fabric planter, and then you can do them in layers. You know, you can have one at the bottom and then one in the middle, and every foot or so you can hang a new one so that you could have it cover your whole wall. And you could grow not just succulents in there, but edibles or flowers or anything that you wanted. So that's another system that you could buy, would be these uh pouch type systems. And they're in a lot of the local nurseries I've seen them lately, and and I'm sure you can find them on online as well. And then another type that I actually just recently bought is a wooden planter. Now we you know we often have raised beds, right, made out of wood. Are are many of your raised beds out of wood? All of them. All of them, yeah. Mine mine are too. And I'm at a room, you know, I my little vegetable garden only holds three raised beds, and of course I'm always lusting after more space to plant more things. Oh, aren't we all? But I saw this um vertical garden wooden planter at Creighton Barrel and got it, and it um is basically think of a bookshelf. Uh so this is would look just like a bookshelf, but instead of horizontal shelves, it has uh diagonal shelves. They go in at a diagonal, and so when you put soil in, those diagonal shelves hold the soil in. Yeah. And I have filled that up with herbs and strawberries, and I put two patio tomatoes at the very top because you know the patio tomatoes will only get about 24 inches tall. So I'm real excited and pleased with it, and it's really fun because the the strawberries just hang over the edge, so they're real easy to see when they're ripe. You can just pick them off. And it's pretty. It's real pretty. It's really pretty. And it's using it's it's only about um oh, eight inches deep. So I have it up against the wall of the garage where I couldn't put anything. It I couldn't even put a pot because it was too narrow. You know, it it would jet out. If I put a big round pot, it was in the pathway in the garden. So being able to put this thing that's only about eight inches deep is great. And I was so surprised because I bought a bag of potting soil, you know, to fill it up. And I bought two one and a half cubic foot bags of potting soil, which you know will fill up a pretty big container, right? It wasn't enough. That that thing holds four cubic feet of soil. Wow. And it has uh six different, no, seven different six different shelves plus the top. So there's seven different uh sections that you can plant in, and each section held either five strawberry plants or five herbs. And so it when you multiply that out, that's like 35 plants in this little four foot by four foot uh planter that is only six inches deep.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

Which was in useless space anyway.

SPEAKER_03 17:23

Which was a useless space. So it just goes to show that this vertical planting concept allows you to put so much in such a small space, and the reason is is you're going out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

You know, and it also allows you to use your own creativity. Oh, when you have a box, you know, there's not a lot of creativity to a wood box. But you could you could do baskets, you can do um I saw one somebody use a pallet.

SPEAKER_03 17:54

Yes. I've seen a lot of that on the internet, that they turn a pallet vertically and they line it with landscape cloth, and then fill it you you do that so that the soil doesn't fall out of the slats, and then you fill it with soil and plant your plants in the slatted openings, and all of a sudden it's very similar to the one that I bought in that you know a pallet is what, only five inches deep, maybe, and you get you know, a couple dozen plants in in a in a pallet, which you can probably get for free someplace, I would imagine.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

You know, they can also take your design statements from something very rustic and rural to something more sophisticated. There's so many different ones out there, and I love the one you were talking about with your neighbors' friends on a fence. Could you tell us about that?

SPEAKER_03 18:44

Yeah, so here's some, in addition to these ones we've been talking about that that you would purchase the system, you know, from a manufacturer who specializes in vertical gardening systems, you can you can make make them up on your own, like you did with your uh succulent retaining wall that you use. That was something that you built yourself. So a friend of mine's daughter, who is just in her first home, newlyweds, and they're renting a little house, and it has this cute little picket fence, and she got the idea of just getting some six-inch clay pots and some real long zip ties, and she zip tied these pots along the picket fence and did a couple of pots on each of the vertical posts of the picket fence, and then she planted an herb in each one. So she has this darling little herb garden that she sees right outside her kitchen window, and it took her, you know, uh an hour or so to zip tie these pots and fill them with herbs, and it's just darling.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

You know, and you could decorate those pots. Oh, yeah. You could paint them to put colors to match your house. Good idea. Have the children do it, and they could each be their own little pot that they own and grow what they want in it. Absolutely. All kinds of stuff could be done with it.

SPEAKER_03 20:02

Really, really a cute idea. Uh actually, her what she did, plus at the same in the same week, it was kind of funny, this was a couple months ago. Uh, in the same week that I saw her little post on Facebook, of course, um, I also went to visit my sister, and she's she loves to garden as well. I think it must be genetic in our family, everybody gardens. And she lives uh in just a regular, you know, track home, doesn't have a big yard, but she does try to grow edibles, and for years she's tried to grow strawberries, and she's gotten frustrated because the snails and the slugs were always getting to the strawberries that she had planted in the ground. And so her husband had this old ladder he was gonna throw away, and she got this brainstorm that she would turn it into a vertical garden for her strawberries. And so what she did was you know how the ladder only has the rungs on the one side? Mm-hmm. Well, she asked her husband to put rungs on the other side. So he just cut up, you know, some pieces of wood and made rungs on the other side of the ladder, so now both sides of the ladder have rungs on. Crafty guy. Crafty guy. And then she went to, I don't know, Target or the container store or someplace. And you know those little plastic baskets that you store tchotchkies or kids' toys or something in, you know, they're they're maybe what, I don't know, ten inches by eight inches or something like that. Well, she just lined that with landscape cloth, filled it with potting soil, and planted two strawberry plants in each of these baskets. And she got them in the baskets were two different colors. They're like blue and I think a peach color. And so on each step, she alternates one of the baskets a blue one, a peach one, a blue one, a peach one, and that's her new strawberry garden. And she says the snails and the slugs don't have access to them like they did before. And the strawberries, as we mentioned, love great drainage and they're up high, so the water just drains right away. And these cute little strawberries are hanging over the edge of the baskets, and it looks just darling. It's just so cute. So that there's a recycled ladder that was going to get thrown away, and some you know, 99 cent baskets, uh, low potting soil, and some strawberry plants, and she's got a vertical garden. And probably she has, I would guess, she probably has four times as many plants on this ladder vertical garden than she could have in the footprint that the ladder takes up, which is probably maybe two feet by four feet. And so in that space, she probably has three or four times as many plants using this little vertical garden system. And it's cute. And it's darling. I mean, you walk out in her yard, and now it's a centerpiece of her yard. It's a it's a conversation starter, you know. Everyone goes, Oh, that's so cute. So, and you know, she's she says she's looking for another used ladder so she can do it with lettuce, you know. So she's probably gonna be knocking on her neighbor's doors to find old ladders. I love it, yeah. Um, and then another one that um I've seen that I've actually done, and this is perfect for me because um I can never throw a pot away. Do you have do you have a few pots at your house? Oh yeah. Yeah. So I have clay pots of assorted sizes, and which drives my husband crazy because I always have stacks of pots throughout the yard. But you can just stack these clay pots. You can get start out with a big one on the bottom, you know, maybe you have like a 16-inch or bigger, you know, pot in diameter, and you fill that with potting soil, and then you get maybe a 10-inch pot. And how would you stack them? All you do is you fill the bottom one with soil, and then you sit the next pot on top of the soil. And it just sits there. And then for the third, I only go three levels because I don't want it to be tipping over. But um, so say you have a 10 or 12-inch pot as your second pot, you fill that with soil, and then for your last pot, it's maybe a six or an eight-inch pot. So then you plant around the outside. You plant around the edges, but as you and I know, the plants the roots can go underneath. Can go underneath, and so they result in really happy, healthy plants because they have all of that room, all of that soil to grow in. So, again, for for plants like lettuce or strawberries or herbs, think of how many herbs you know you can get growing in in that area. It it gives you a lot more opportunity and it's just interesting to look at. It's more interesting to look at. Beautiful too, yes. It's unique.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:57

And as you and I know, I I'm not the greatest garden designer, you're probably better than me, but you always in your garden want to have height, right? If if all of our plants are just, you know, a foot tall, not a very interesting yard, right? We want to have trees that are tall and shrubs that are medium and you know, flowers that are lower. But it's always nice to have things that have different height. Dimension. Dimension. And so stacking these pots or putting a vertical garden wall on one of the walls of your home or or one of the walls of your property, like your retaining wall, just gives you so much more interest in your yard or or your balcony or patio or whatever you have. That sounds delightful. Yeah, so that that gives you some ideas. So we've talked about purchasing some systems, we've talked about making up systems on your own, and I'm sure that lots of clever people have lots of things. If you go to Pinterest or, you know, just Google vertical gardens, you're gonna get scads of ideas.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

You know, I think a lot of people say, Oh, I'm not that creative. But if you go, we have this thing called the internet.

SPEAKER_02 26:15

Yeah. Yeah, you don't have to be creative anymore. You can just steal ideas.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

Just go to the internet and check it, you know, c type in vertical gardens, and you can see so many different things, and some of them might just be right for your home or apartment or condo.

SPEAKER_03 26:29

Yeah. One other one I just remembered, um, I saw when I was on a a garden tour a couple years ago, I think it was the Sherman Gardens garden tour, and these folks had saved five uh pound cans, coffee cans. Remember five-pound cans? Yes. Yeah, I mean we all get Starbucks now, but um, back in the day when you would buy a five-pound can of coffee, right? That's a pretty good sized can. Yes, it is. And they make great planners, you know, you just poke holes in the bottom of them and they make great planners. Well, this person had spray painted the outside of these cans different bright colors, orange and blue and yellow and red, and then they had attached them to their fence and used that as a vertical garden. So there were, I don't know, maybe a couple dozen of these colorful pots up and down this fence that they had. Uh they had flowers planted in them, but you know, you could grow whatever you wanted in them. But another do-it-yourself, recycled, repurposed vertical garden. Way ahead of their time before the vertical garden thing has become so popular. Wow. Yeah. But we should probably talk a little bit before we um encourage folks to really get into this about some of the do's and don'ts for vertical gardens. So, first of all, you have to decide where you're gonna locate it. And you need to look at what kind of sun that spot gets. And if you like your succulent wall, I imagine gets full sun all the time. It gets a lot of sun. Yeah. And so that determined what kind of plants you were gonna plant there. Succulents were a good choice. Lettuce was not. Lettuce was not too sunny, too hot. Also, the material that you were using, those um stackable stones or pavers, get super hot when the sun hits them, right? Right. So again, you wouldn't want to plant lettuce there if the stones are getting super hot. Exactly. It's too hot. Too hot. So that's the first thing you have to do. You have to look at the wall where you're gonna put, if it is a wall, where you're gonna put your vertical garden. And if it's sunny, then it's probably a good place to grow edibles, but if it's too hot, then you wouldn't want to plant things like strawberries and lettuce because they don't like to be in 90 degree temperatures. So that's something that you would need to think about when you're deciding where and if you can have this vertical garden. If you're gonna plant flowers or succulents or edibles, you do need to have six to eight hours of sun. If you don't have that, doesn't mean you can't have a vertical garden, but you'd want to plant some plants that are maybe more shade tolerant. Um, some flowers or ferns or I was thinking if you have a shady area, why not just do a fern wall? Exactly, wouldn't that be gorgeous? Gorgeous. Yeah, different kinds of ferns would be just so pretty. Um or you know, uh think about uh some of the plants we use in house in the house. You know, they don't get a lot of sun because they're house plants. So if you had a real sheltered, you know, shady area on a balcony, you might want to look at those types of plants and see if those would be suitable. I could see a pothos, you know, kind of hanging down in a vertical garden. That would be really pretty. Oh, that would be pretty. Yeah. So do think about what kind of sun it gets before you choose the plants that you're gonna put in your garden system. Then also make sure that you have some watering options. For instance, the little wooden vertical garden that I just got, because I we like to go camping a lot, I know I'm gonna be in and out, and I wanted to make sure that it would water, have the ability to be watered. And what I liked about this system is it came with a drip line that you just wound back and forth through each of the levels of the planting area, and then there was a hose attachment on the side of the planter, so you just screw in your hose, and you could buy, which I will when we start traveling, a battery operated timer and hook that up to the hose, and then you just set it for when you want it to water, and it will automatically open the valve and the drip system will irrigate that vertical planting system. Oh, how nice. Yeah. So it's a little more it's a little bit more self-sufficient. Exactly. So if you are, you know, going to be the kind of person who travels a lot, consider the irrigation system that you that you're going to use to water that, because you do have to remember that with any kind of container garden, it's relying totally on you for its water.

SPEAKER_01 31:15

So let's talk a little more. Yeah, well, you were just talking about a minute ago, it was about having it on the timer. Yeah. And as you're doing the announcement, I was thinking, you know, if you're busy and you're traveling and you have business or whatever, you could still have that because what my first thought is, wow, it's it's in a it's in a pot or it's on the wall and it's going to dry up fast. And I'm not going to be home to take care of it. But exactly what you're saying, you could have it on a timer. Yeah. Even if it did come came with a timer, you could rig something up that has water in your system and then have it on a timer. And it's it's good for the busy person.

SPEAKER_03 31:56

It is. And I don't know if you've ever bought these battery-operated timers, but you can get them at any hardware store. You just put, you know, a couple of batteries in these things, and they're usually super simple to set. You know, you just twist the dial and say you want it to come on every other day for you know 10 minutes or however long. And then you there's an outlet in the timer where you connect your hose, and then you connect your timer. You have you need another little piece of hose to connect the timer to your hose attachment that would be on your planter area. But it's great. The timer, what it does is it has a little valve, and when the timer goes off, it opens that valve, the water goes through, and then when the time is up, the valve closes and you're done watering. So it works perfectly for people who travel. Or if you're just busy, you know. Too busy, yeah, and you don't want to worry about it. Busy lifestyle, yeah. Which a lot of us have. Exactly. The other thing, uh, talking about any kind of container gardening, is those poor little plants are relying on you for water, but they're also relying on you for food because they can't stretch their roots down into the ground to go in search of nutrients. So, with vertical gardens, as for any containers, you do have to fertilize or feed your plants regularly. So just you know, try and you know, mark a day on your calendar. You know, the first of every month, you put a little uh fish emulsion is a great, you know, gentle fertilizer. You mix a little of that up in a watering can and you know, just hand water. Or if you're real busy and uh you want to get a time-released fertilizer, there are synthetic fertilizers that are encapsulated in a material that dissolves over time, and they usually last three to four months. Osmocote is one brand, I think Miracle Grow. Lots of different companies make these time-release fertilizers. So just look for one that says feeds your garden for three months or four months or whatever. And that's another easy way to feed feed your plants if you're gonna be gone a lot. Uh one thing I should mention too, is because I learned this the hard way with the one that I planted, is do be sure you anchor these things well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, real important. Real important foundation. So, as I mentioned, the ones we have at the great park, we actually slip the planters over a pole, you know, a post that you would use, a fence post. And of course, we sink the fence post in the ground, and so that's really well anchored. Uh the one that I have at home, which is made out of wood, uh red cedar, I put it and I filled it with soil and it looked pretty sturdy, and I planted it and thought everything was good, and for about a week it was good. But what I failed to take into consideration is the surface that it was sitting on is decomposed granite. It wasn't a cement slab. And so as I watered it, the decomposed granite softened, right? And so the planter, because it's heavy now, it's got all this soil in it, started to sink a little and it tipped and fell flat on its poor little face. And uh, but it was a very well-built planter, so it didn't break or anything. So, what I did is I stood it back up and I put some eye bolts in the back of it and took some wire, and fortunately, there's a little trellis pole that goes to a trellis, and so I just wired the planter to the trellis pole. If I didn't have a trellis pole, I probably would have to gotten some rebar poles and I would have taken a sledgehammer and pounded that rebar into the ground about a foot, and then I could have you know tied it to the rebar behind the planter. So one way or the other, make sure it's secure. Make sure it's secure. And if you are going to be attaching something to a wall, if you say live in a condominium or an apartment, um, you'll need to make sure that you're not doing something that would uh you know damage the wall permanently or irritate your landlord. So just just be sure that you you know are are doing it in a responsible manner, but you do want to make sure it's anchored well because you don't want it to fall on you or anyone else or a pet. So do anchor these systems uh to keep them from falling over.

SPEAKER_01 36:35

Words of wisdom.

SPEAKER_03 36:36

Yeah. Like I said, I learned the hard way. It looked like it was fine. Live and learn, huh? Yeah, yeah. Uh let's see, what haven't we talked about? Um let's talk a little more about plant selection. So, Katrina, you did succulents and you had such a large amount of space. I love how you propagated your own succulents to keep filling up the wall. I think a lot of people would enjoy doing succulents uh on these vertical garden systems for just the visual variety and color. Tell tell them how you propagate succulents to do that in a cheap way so that you're not spending tons of money for all these succulents.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Yeah, I am by no way expert on this. Yeah. I did several different things and they all seemed to work. I stuck I just snipped them off and stuck them in some dirt and waited till they got some roots and then stuck them in there, and other ones I just stuck, cut them off and stuck them in, and they grew roots. So you didn't even root some of them, didn't even root I didn't know which way was going to work better, and they both seemed to work just fine. You know, I just made sure there was enough soil around in that hole so they could start growing, and they just start growing. Now, some of them like to grow straight up and some of them will will cascade down, so you kind of have to figure out which one it is. But it was a trial and error error, and it's okay because some of them that used to grow straight up now kind of droop over and come up, which makes it a kind of interesting. Yeah. So they all take on a little bit of a different personality, and some of them are just like rosettes just ha hanging on the wall, and some hang down and trellis down several feet, and you know, they all kind of do their own little different thing.

SPEAKER_03 38:24

I wish it was TV and not radio so that we could show pictures, but people will have to admit imagine.

SPEAKER_01 38:31

It is just it was simple. He you know, I didn't really know what I was doing, and I just I had about not a lot of space, and I got some cactus soil, and you know, I dug out the old dirt which wasn't very good and put it in there and Yeah, tell people what uh cactus soil, what's the difference between regular soil and cactus soil?

SPEAKER_03 38:50

Uh the it's the drainage, right? You need you need good drainage. Good drainage. Yeah. So if if you ever go to the uh nursery or home improvement center, you'll see these bags that are labeled cactus mixed or sometimes they're called citrus, palm, and succulent mix. And those types of plants want really good drainage. That means they don't want soil that retains a lot of water. They want the water to come in, they take it, but then it goes out of the soil pretty quickly. It doesn't sit there. So if you are doing a succulent garden in your vertical garden, do be sure that you choose a succulent or cactus mix as your potting mix. You don't want to use regular potting soil.

SPEAKER_01 39:39

And I'd say that's probably what took the longest because I had didn't have a lot of room to work with, and so I had a screwdriver, and I dug out some of these places with my screwdriver and just kind of shoved soil in and shoved the succulents in. Yeah. And then I watered them well, and you know, some of them I did plant in the ground and to see how and then they propagated and they came up and they were wonderful, and uh and some I put in pots, and you know, I just had a kind of little fun thing going on there and just put them in there and they just took off. And I made sure there was soil around it when I put the soil back in.

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Succulents are amazing. They're so amazing. I never was a succulent person until the last couple years, and the more I do it, the more I like it, which is a good thing because with our you know, shortage of water these days, I think that it's a good choice for us to have succulents in our garden uh rather than things that take a whole lot of water.

SPEAKER_01 40:35

You know, and they do need water, but they don't need a whole lot of it. Yeah. You know, just that whole wall, I just occasionally go down there. I'll go on vacation and forget to water it, and then when I come back, I'll water it. Yeah. You know, it's just a hose spraying it so it soaks in a little bit.

SPEAKER_03 40:48

Yeah. Yeah, no, uh, they're they're great for uh people who travel a lot or or people who are just wanting to save water and still have something green or colorful to look at. Because the second ones come in all different colors too.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. Just the colors, the the array of colors, and the when they flower, the flowers are beautiful, and you know, depending on how some of them turn different colors in the sun and depending on how much sun it has.

SPEAKER_03 41:13

Oh wow, I've got to come out and look at it.

SPEAKER_01 41:14

Sounds stunning. It's fun. It's fun. And then I was thinking about what you're talking about about attaching it to a wall. You know, in your backyard, just having a succulent wall. Yeah. I mean, you could plan colors or shapes and what you know, you could do, you mentioned the palettes before.

SPEAKER_03 41:30

You know, if you filled a palette up with this the uh cactus mix and poked succulents in those openings on the palettes, that would be so cute. And you could do a row of one kind of succulent, then switch to a different kind of succulent and end up having kind of a pattern even. Yeah, you could get a design in it somehow.

SPEAKER_01 41:48

Yeah, yeah. So or flowing through or you have brays of the color going through.

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Yeah, it would it would be really fun. Um let's talk though also a little bit about edibles. The succulents are super easy, super fun, don't take a lot of water. But if you want to grow some edibles and your challenge, space challenged, I'm I'm loving this little vertical garden I have. But you do have to be a little careful about the plants that you choose, because as I mentioned before, you don't want to try and plant a fruit tree in a vertical garden, right? So the things that are the best to plant in these vertical gardens are things that stay a small size. So think about lettuce, arugula, spinach, and of course it's it's uh the wrong time of year now, since it's May, uh it's too hot to plant those things now. But in the fall and all winter long and through the early spring, those would be great choices to grow in a vertical garden.

SPEAKER_01 42:49

A friend of mine grew bok choy.

SPEAKER_03 42:51

Oh, bok choy.

SPEAKER_01 42:52

She created so much bok choy out of her vertical garden, it was wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 42:56

Any greens, you know, the Asian greens, um the traditional lettuces, the spinaches, kale, my new favorite vegetable. And you know, I might even try kale in the vertical garden. It seems to tolerate heat a little better than the lettuce, don't you think? Oh, definitely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 43:13

I can grow kale pretty much all year long. All year? I can grow kale all the time.

SPEAKER_03 43:17

Good, then I'm gonna I'm gonna try that in my vertical garden when this crop is done. I'm gonna try some kale.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

You know, you could also do if you're planting winter vegetables and it's too hot in the summertime, you could just plant flowers. Absolutely. Change it out, be creative. Yeah. Get some c summer color in there.

SPEAKER_03 43:34

But I decided to do herbs in mine in you know, now that it's summer, um, because you know, time stays small and time is fine. Parsley doesn't like a lot of heat, but I I decided to put some parsley in it for as long as it'll take the heat, and then I'll pull it out and put something else in. I put basil in. Now, basil we know can grow to three feet tall, but in a vertical garden, Basil loves to be pinched back. And so what I'm going to do is just keep it, you know, down under a foot tall by just keeping pinching off the growing tips and keep making pesto.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

There you go. Or the other thing is And the tomatoes, you know, your tomatoes are in season, a little bit of basil.

SPEAKER_03 44:19

And then I did choose um two patio tomatoes, and and I'll have to let everybody know later on how it worked. But I did choose two patio tomatoes because they only get 24 inches tall. And I put those in the very top of this vertical planter so that they can do their 24-inch thing. But I don't think it'll get too top heavy, especially now that I have it secured. But it looks really cool right now with the two tomatoes and then all the I have then the basil below that, and then I have two rows of strawberries and then the rows of herbs below that. Oh, I also planted onion. Really? Yeah, not not the big bulbean onions, but the green onions. You know, because they stay small, right? Yeah. So I've got green onions in there, and in the winter, in the fall, I'm going to plant carrot seeds. Because this the way this particular vertical planter works is that the um the slanted diagonal shelves only go part way back. And so the soil that you pour in actually goes all the way from the top to the bottom. So I'm thinking that I can put some carrots in because they'll have room for their roots to go down uh deeper. Because these this isn't like a bookshelf where the shelf cuts off the area. It's open. It's open, it's just slanted, and then the back four inches is open. Oh wow. So you can put the carrot seeds. I'm thinking I can plant the little carrot seeds, maybe I'll just grow down, and then when I harvest them, I'll just have to wiggle them out. How about beets? Probably. Any kind of root vegetable I think would work. Oh my god. That's why I'm trying the onions first, because they aren't quite as deep as the other root vegetables. But don't you think? Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

I'm just having this visual of it. It sounds wonderful.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

So, anyway, so I'm excited about um, you know, trying this. And I'll probably choose a carrot variety that's one of the short carrot varieties, not not one that's gonna get, you know, eight inches long. But if I get one of the short carrot varieties that only get like four inches long, I think it'll be perfect.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

You know what's nice about this is no matter how much sun you have, there's you can go from a lot of sun where you have your succulents or cactus, even if you wanted to do that, to shady areas where you could do ferns. Oh yeah. So whatever side of the house you have available, it's uh something that's available to plant.

SPEAKER_03 46:49

Absolutely. And you know, one of the things that I always try to disguise when I'm landscaping are the darn walls, right? You your your property wall between you and your neighbor. You know, that's not cinder block, not very attractive, right? So we always try to grow something in front of it. These vertical gardens in front of these walls are genius. So much more interesting than than walls.

SPEAKER_01 47:12

You know, it's gonna be interesting in the next 10, 15 years what's gonna be coming out. You know, limited space, what can people do? People wanted to get back to gardening, they don't have space.

SPEAKER_03 47:22

Yeah, I think so. And and we're we're expanding our ideas of what's appropriate and what's, you know, we have to get away from our thoughts about well, the traditional yard has a lawn, it has shrubs, you know, it has a shade tree. It's it's time for us, especially as our homes get more packed tightly together, to kind of think outside the box and see how we can create something that's really interesting and maybe gives us food and doesn't use a lot of water, and I think we're gonna end up with a lot more interesting landscapes as a byproduct, you know. Definitely. Yeah. So let's see. Um, how do you plant these things? Well, the planting depends upon the system, and so with the system that I use, the little wooden planter, you filled it with soil, and then you just chose the plants that had small root balls. So I only used plants from six packs. I would not, you know, buy a four-inch or certainly not a gallon plant, right? That'd be a little tough to shove in there. But the six packs were perfect, they were the perfect size to fit in the opening, and you plant it just like you would any place else. You loosen the roots at the bottom of the plant and make a little um hole for the plant in the planter and put it in. Um, and then of course, if you were doing something like my sister did with the little baskets, you know, that's super easy. You can even plant those baskets, you know, on a table somewhere else and then carry them over to the ladder and sit them down. Uh, your little retaining wall, you know, you stood there and you know dug each little hole for your succulent. So I did it over a period of time too. Sure. So it depends. There's no real specific direction on how to plant these things. You have to uh look at the system that you're either creating or or building from a kit and figure out.

SPEAKER_01 49:22

So maybe you also want to look at like what what side of the wall that you're working on, you know, the sunny side, the shady side, because that will pretty much dictate what you're gonna be able to plant. Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 49:31

That's your first step is before you ever decide to buy or create one of these, is look at how much sun it's gonna get. Because it's gonna tell you whether you're planting succulents or edibles or ferns. You know, you just have to figure out what what kind of sun it's gonna get. And then you have to think about what you're purchasing, is it right for your property? Right, yeah. Because you don't want to invest the money and have it not be successful, so um, but you know, it's always an experiment, and you know, hopefully if if it doesn't work on one wall, maybe you have a second place where you can try it and and move it around. But it um, you know, what a fun project. And and think about it, if you have I I have a friend who said uh I gave a little talk on this vertical gardening thing at the South Coast Plaza Garden Show, and I had a friend come up to me afterwards and she says her her parents who were farmers are older and and needed to go into uh a lovely assisted living community, um, but they miss their farm. You know, they've spent their lives growing things, and so she saw this vertical planter and she says, I'm gonna get it. I'm gonna send it to them because they're in their 80s and they can't bend and they can't stoop, but they could have this thing and just stand there and you know put their little herbs or their little flowers in and enjoy getting back in touch with the the joy of growing that that they are missing now that they're beyond the age where they can be out on the farm anymore. So it's it's a great thing for people who are have limited mobility. Um, but think about kids. You know, kids they're gonna be eye-level with this. You plant strawberry plants and they're eye-level with that. How fun are is that gonna be? Oh my gosh, they're gonna drive you crazy.

SPEAKER_02 51:20

Can I pick a strawberry page?

SPEAKER_01 51:22

Well, this is a real tough opportunity to to get out of the box, so to speak, or out of your box. Or create a new kind of box.

SPEAKER_03 51:31

Yeah, it really is is uh if you use your imagination, get online, steal other people's ideas, have fun, be creative, get the whole family involved.

SPEAKER_01 51:41

Get the whole family involved. There's a lot to it. Make yourself happy. Find a design that you like.

SPEAKER_03 51:47

Yeah, and once you find the ideas on the internet, turn off the computer and have everybody get outside and do something that's not connected, that's unplugged for a change. Get get your hands in the dirt and and uh get everybody out working together.

SPEAKER_01 52:05

Oh, I think that's a grand idea.

SPEAKER_03 52:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:07

Katina, thank you so much. I've been I've learned so much today. I really appreciate it. Is there any last words of wisdom?

SPEAKER_03 52:14

Um, how much time do we have left?

SPEAKER_01 52:17

We could have five minutes.

SPEAKER_03 52:19

Five minutes? Okay, well, let me just talk to people a little bit about growing edibles, since that's you know, maybe a little more needs a little more instruction, right? And so with with the edibles, if you're growing these herbs or lettuces or maybe these little tomatoes, we'll see how they do, strawberries. Some of them have a pretty long life cycle. Like you and I plant lettuce in the fall, right? And I just pulled mine out the end of April. Uh, because with lettuce you can harvest the outer leaves and just eat those outer leaves and you let the center of the plant continue to produce new leaves. The same with herbs, you know, you're clipping off just the herbs that you need, and the plant continues to grow new leaves. So over the course of time, you're gonna need to fertilize it more than just the one time when you plant it. Even if you use that fertilizer that lasts for three to four months, if you plant in October and you don't take it out till April, we're talking, you know, six months. So you're gonna need to fertilize. So you can either add new granular fertilizer and just gently scratch it in to the soil around the plants. Or what I like to do, especially for the edibles, is I like to use the organic fish emulsion, and I just mix it in a watering can and pour that, you know, in the vertical planter, letting it percolate through all of the layers, and that will fertilize your edibles so that they keep producing, so that you have these edibles over a very long period of time. And then the last thing we should mention is when you are picking your edibles, uh, the best time to do it for anything, whether it's in a planter or in the ground, is in the morning. It's A, it's better for you to be out there before the sun's beating down on you, and the plants are full of moisture in the morning. They're not, you know, uh drying out from the sun beating on them all day. So they have the most moisture. You're gonna have you know crisper lettuce leaves if you pick these things in the morning, and then bring them inside, wash them, let them dry a little bit, and depending on the fruit or the vegetable, uh, tomatoes I leave and store those at room temperature because their flavor is much better if you don't put them in the refrigerator. And then for lettuce and other vegetables, of course, after I wash it, then I would dry it off, put it in a container or a ziploc, and let it crisp up in the fridge all day, and then have a yummy salad for dinner.

SPEAKER_01 54:59

I'm just thinking of all the possibilities here. This is exciting. This is really bringing a lot to people who don't have room and even people who do have room to add dimension in their yards.

SPEAKER_03 55:08

I know, I know. And I hope maybe even some of our UCI students are listening and maybe they can, you know, have a little vertical garden out, you know, outside their dorm room and eat some more fresh, healthy food. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 55:23

Oh gosh, Tina, I uh I thank you so much. I've learned so much about vertical gardening today, and I really appreciate all your words of wisdom as always, and I want to thank all our listeners and Thanks for having me, Richard.