The Vertical Gardening Guidebook Read Online Free PDF Page A

sweet corn and spinach, you can put down the nitrogen fertilizer once the plants have grown between three and five true leaves. Nitrogen fertilizer shouldn’t be used on tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, cucumbers, squash or eggplants until they have started to bear fruit. Doing it too soon could minimize the amount of fruit they produce, or worse, it could prevent them from growing fruit at all.
     

C HAPTER 4. H OW TO B UILD A F REE- S TANDING V ERTICAL G ARDEN
    A free-standing vertical garden can be much easier to build than you might think! There are a couple of ways you can build one, but we’ll focus on the two most common and easiest ways.
    For a free-standing garden, you will need several feet of space. This works best if you have a small sized yard and grass to work with. It’s probably not a good option if you live in an apartment or condo – you may went to use an aeroponics gardening system if you have only a few feet of space to work with.
    The first one we’ll discuss looks like a fence and can be used as such if you’re looking to increase the privacy of your yard, patio or balcony. The difference is that the free-standing structure has a double layer, so that plants can be placed in the middle of the layers.
    You can make your free-standing vertical garden as wide and tall as you want it, but just keep in mind the accessibility of it. You don’t want to have to climb ladders to reach the top and you don’t want to have to bend too low to reach the bottom if you have back problems.
    The tools and materials you will need to build a free-standing vertical garden structure are:
          Hammer or drill
          Nails or screws
          Two-by-fours
          Extra wood for small pieces to be cut
          Wooden posts
          Tape measure
          Saw
    A free-standing vertical garden is ideal if you don’t have a wall or roof to hang your plants. It’s cheap to make and quite easy if you’ve ever worked with carpentry projects. If you don’t have any experience, ask your friends or family to come over and help you – it will make for a fun and productive day!
    Keep in mind that there are many different designs for free-standing vertical gardens that you can purchase online, but this is only one of the two examples of how you can do it yourself.
    Here are the steps to follow to build your free-standing vertical garden:
    The Fence-Like Vertical Garden
     
Cut eight two-by-fours into the length of your choice (The length of these boards will be the length of your garden)
Cut four wood posts into the height of your choice (The post height will determine the height of your garden)
Begin nailing the two-by-fours to the front and back of the wooden posts until it makes four equal rows.
Nail smaller cut pieces of wood that are a few inches wide at the ends of the two-by-fours to close them off (This helps provide more support for the structure).
Nail blocks of wood every four inches in between the two-by-fours, so that the plant can sit on something inside of the two-by-fours.
The final construction can be dug into the dirt like a fence, so that it doesn’t tip over and fall.
Close up the bottoms of the two-by-fours with a strainer-like net and place your soil and plants inside these nets – you can buy plant hangers or plant holders at any gardening supply store or online.
    Below is a picture of the design and layout of the fence-like vertical garden wall. If you need to see the picture in greater detail you can see the full-size version here on the website .

    When the garden is complete it should look like the picture below.

     

The Communal Wall Method
    This is another way that you can construct your free-standing vertical garden. It is easily moved and can be placed anywhere you have the space for it. You can place flowering pots at the bottom of the communal wall and allow them to creep up the sides.
    The structure is