Urban Gardner: Climb Upwards for Success

Saturday, April 26, 2014

Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalProv Gardening Expert

Urban gardeners seize opportunity in spaces large and small. We gamble on sunshine between close buildings. Odd neglected corners, broken pavements, deserted lots ironically not good enough for anything else, rooftops, window sills, all serve our need to cultivate, to grow, to reach beyond. Deep generative impulses trump the dark forces. Gardens offer hope and aspiration. They are expressions drawn from the inner being made manifest. Each delicious salad, meal, array of fantastic forms, scent, color, and taste are aspects of the greater existence within everyone. Let’s take advantage of what others may see as the cast offs and unworthy. Life is profoundly strong and beautiful.

Gardeners with unlimited horizons stay close to the ground. Most of us are in more limited circumstances. Do not allow fences or small footprints smother your dreams. They are actually the rungs on Jacob’s Ladder. Let’s climb these barriers for vertical success. Gardeners have faced this challenge since Adam and Eve cavorted among the apple trees. Let’s take a look at techniques available to the smallest budget and the tightest corner.

Look upwards towards the sun. Pause and firmly place your feet in contact with the earth. Imagine energy as a taproot penetrating the ground beneath towards the planet’s center. Allow the energy endless depth. Release the energy from below upwards from heal to toe, upward through the calves and hips, pause for a moment just below your deepest breath. Your breath is the glue. Inhale the garden’s scent. Exhale the past and envision growth upwards. Energy will spread through the limbs and upward through the crown of the head. It’s easy for gardeners to embrace this metaphor and look upwards higher and higher into space. You’ve found it! Here’s a place to grow where none existed before.

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Vertical gardening enjoys a renannaisance. Not since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon have vertical spaces become as conceptually available for the gardener. Everyone deserves to enjoy the bounty and joy of growing upwards instead of feeding the ravenous desire to spread outwards. Community garden plots are especially suited for vertical growth. Do not restrict yourself to isolated plots. Walls often offer the best southern exposure and wind protection. Gardeners perceive the advantages of the exposure and site. Let’s take a look at techniques ready to help realize dreams.

The trellis has long associations with gardeners. They are any upright support that lifts sprawling plants higher and above. Shape is the whimsy of gardener, materials and site. There are many plants of different purposes that thrive, indeed demand, support. The pole bean, cucumbers, peas, tomatoes, grapes, and many others have evolved to tower, tangle, twist, over those below. Encourage them.
A trellis is an artful creation. They can be simple or complex. Re-cycled materials are your friends for these projects. Whether the upright supports are to last generations or a season, urban gardeners enjoy robust sources of materials on sidewalks, dumpsters and yes, garden centers. Let your imagination dominate.

Orient whenever possible a trellis north-south for the best solar perspective. Compromise when forced, don’t settle for less when given the choice. A trellis allows leaves, fruits, and blooms to exist in vacant spaces. A traditional example abounds in our cities. Many driveways paved to the nth degree are surmounted by pipe or lumber arbors. Grape vines appeal to the practical home wine maker. Greenery shades pavements baked in sunshine. Surely the food laden table under an arbor beneath lovely bunches of hanging grapes is a setting familiar from generation to generation. Gardeners grow many things, not least the heart. Let yours swell too.

Welcome shade offers peace and privacy. Green leaves and blooms flaunt their beauty where nothing grew before. North/south orientation gives the best advantages to your garden beauties. Fertilize the plants roots and they will rebound and grow upwards. Taller plantings offer gardener’s with painful backs a new chance to nurture the garden. No longer confined to stoop labor frees gardener’s from painful choices. There are more advantages.

Fruits and vegetable grown upwards are not in contact with soil borne diseases. They ripen evenly and free from contact with mulch or bare soil are blemish free and easy to clean. Anyone who has grown cucumbers knows trellis grown cukes never have a yellow side where they’ve rested upon the mulch or soil. This axiom prevails with tomatoes as well. Better looking produce is eaten first and least forgotten.
My favorite trellis is made of re-cycled large heavy duty wire mesh. Available from construction site dumpsters are odd pieces of wire usually employed to strengthen poured concrete. Snip and trim your finds to fit. Nail to repurposed lumber, support much greenery during the growing season, strip in the fall, roll up and store on site or under cover until next year. I have wire trellises that have lasted for years in different locations. The couch is not the only possession to follow urbanites from apartment to apartment.

Newer materials and a careful eye to watering is converting walls into growing spaces. Find a south facing wall for intense vertical gardening. Sacks woven from durable re-cycled fibers will suitably contain root systems and allow foliage to drape outward and vertically. What was once a desert is now a paradise. Pay attention. Faithfully water. Have some fun and mix up plants. Like the American family, vertical gardens explore new relationships.

Some of my favorite trellis plants are well known to you. Roses do well on trellises and please spirit and nose. French horticultural beans sometimes known as Scarlet Runner Beans and other varieties of beans clamber over trellises with true abandon. Cucumbers are no longer humble pedestrians but aviators, zeppelins of the garden. Tomatoes offer larger yields when staked up and indeterminate varieties will grow endlessly with support. Plant peas at the foot of the trellis. When your peas are failing in hot weather plant beans at their feet. The beans will grow up and over the peas to offer two crops from one space.

Privacy is an added bonus to this garden style. Grow morning glories as tall as you can build. They will surmount high supports and drape in dramatic cascades. Honeysuckle will achieve the same results and contribute their inspiring fragrance to the garden patch.

Grow upwards and discover unknown space. Double up on crops, mix flowers and vegetables, create private spaces where none existed. Urban gardeners adapt and repurpose spaces long consigned to vacancy and debris. Rise up dear friends grow.

Urban Gardner: Climb Upwards for Success

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