Vertical gardening

Vertical gardening is the technique of allowing plants to grow upwards, rather than outwards in a garden. At Q Gardens, our young scientists recently began establishing our much anticipated vertical garden. Thanks to support from individual donors, we secured all the necessary funds to build a self irrigating vertical gardening system using some recycled materials.

Creativity was key in establishing our vertical garden. Due to the age and size of the young scientists in the urban agriculture program, we had a limit as to how high we could go to ensure that all our young scientists could easily access all aspects of the system. We used an iron obelisk trellis as the anchor to our vertical system. Two-liter bottles were recycled to become the pots, irrigators, and reservoirs of the system, which were attached to each other and the trellis.

During the first phase of our vertical garden, our young scientists planted the following fall-friendly plants: 2 tomatoes, 1 pepper, and 1 celery. In the coming days, we will set up two more vertical garden columns which will include spinach, more peppers, and tomatoes.

The self irrigating system works as follows: the top bottle serves as a reservoir. With only a medium-sized hole on the bottle cap, water drips slowly to the bottle below, which serves as an irrigator. The irrigator is simply the bottom half of a 2-liter bottle with four holes poked in it. This allows the water to slowly drip to the bottle below, which houses our celery. From there, the water drips down to the peppers, and ultimately to the tomato plant. Prior to planting, our young scientists made sure the system was in working order and that the soil was fully saturated. Moving forward, all watering will be done directly into the reservoir, located at the top of the system.