Upside-down gardening is a

kitchen garden The traditional kitchen garden, vegetable garden, also known as a potager (from the French ) or in Scotland a kailyaird, is a space separate from the rest of the residential garden – the ornamental plants and lawn areas. It is used for grow ...

technique where the vegetable

garden A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate both ...

uses suspended

soil Soil, also commonly referred to as earth or dirt, is a mixture of organic matter, minerals, gases, liquids, and organisms that together support life. Some scientific definitions distinguish ''dirt'' from ''soil'' by restricting the former te ...

and

seedling A seedling is a young sporophyte developing out of a plant embryo from a seed. Seedling development starts with germination of the seed. A typical young seedling consists of three main parts: the radicle (embryonic root), the hypocotyl (embry ...

s to stop

pests PESTS was an anonymous American activist group formed in 1986 to critique racism, tokenism, and exclusion in the art world. PESTS produced newsletters, posters, and other print material highlighting examples of discrimination in gallery represent ...

and

blight Blight refers to a specific symptom affecting plants in response to infection by a pathogenic organism. Description Blight is a rapid and complete chlorosis, browning, then death of plant tissues such as leaves, branches, twigs, or floral organ ...

, and eliminate the typical gardening tasks of

tilling Tilling can mean: * Tillage, an agricultural preparation of the soil. * TILLING (molecular biology) * Tilling is a fictional town in the Mapp and Lucia novels of E. F. Benson. * Tilling Green, Ledshire, is a fictional village in Patricia Wentworth ...

weeding Weed control is a type of pest control, which attempts to stop or reduce growth of weeds, especially noxious weeds, with the aim of reducing their competition with desired flora and fauna including domesticated plants and livestock, and in natur ...

, and staking plants. The

vegetable growing Vegetable farming is the growing of vegetables for human consumption. The practice probably started in several parts of the world over ten thousand years ago, with families growing vegetables for their own consumption or to trade locally. At fir ...

yield is only marginally affected. Kathi (Lael) Morris was the first known to grow tomatoes and peppers this way, starting in 1998. Since then, the concept gained tremendous popularity. Ms. Morris grew mostly

heirloom varieties An heirloom plant, heirloom variety, heritage fruit (Australia and New Zealand), or heirloom vegetable (especially in Ireland and the UK) is an old cultivar A cultivar is a type of cultivated plant that people have selected for desired trai ...

, researching over a span of 11 years, which varieties were compact enough to produce fruit in abundance with little or no breakage of the stems.

Advantages over normal gardening

Since upside-down gardens take up far less room than the traditional in-ground type, upside-down ones are more useful in urban areas.

Suitable plantings

Larger vegetables such as

bell pepper The bell pepper (also known as paprika, sweet pepper, pepper, or capsicum ) is the fruit of plants in the Grossum Group of the species ''Capsicum annuum''. Cultivars of the plant produce fruits in different colors, including red, yellow, orange ...

s or large

tomato The tomato is the edible berry of the plant ''Solanum lycopersicum'', commonly known as the tomato plant. The species originated in western South America, Mexico, and Central America. The Mexican Nahuatl word gave rise to the Spanish word ...

es tend to break the

vine A vine (Latin ''vīnea'' "grapevine", "vineyard", from ''vīnum'' "wine") is any plant with a growth habit of trailing or scandent (that is, climbing) stems, lianas or runners. The word ''vine'' can also refer to such stems or runners themselv ...

; smaller peppers such as

cayenne pepper The cayenne pepper is a type of ''Capsicum annuum''. It is usually a moderately hot chili pepper used to flavor dishes. Cayenne peppers are a group of tapering, 10 to 25 cm long, generally skinny, mostly red-colored peppers, often with ...

s and

tabasco pepper The tabasco pepper is a variety of the chili pepper species ''Capsicum frutescens'' originating in Mexico. It is best known through its use in Tabasco sauce, followed by peppered vinegar. Like all ''C. frutescens'' cultivars, the tabasco plant ...

have lower weight and thus

gravity In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the stro ...

does not stress the vine to breakage. Other potential upside-down gardening vegetables include:

cucumber Cucumber (''Cucumis sativus'') is a widely-cultivated Vine#Horticultural climbing plants, creeping vine plant in the Cucurbitaceae family that bears usually cylindrical Fruit, fruits, which are used as culinary vegetables.

eggplant Eggplant ( US, Canada), aubergine ( UK, Ireland) or brinjal (Indian subcontinent, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa) is a plant species in the nightshade family Solanaceae. ''Solanum melongena'' is grown worldwide for its edible fruit. Mos ...

s, and

bean A bean is the seed of several plants in the family Fabaceae, which are used as vegetables for human or animal food. They can be cooked in many different ways, including boiling, frying, and baking, and are used in many traditional dishes th ...

s. The top side may also be used. On the top side of upside-down planters,

lettuce Lettuce (''Lactuca sativa'') is an annual plant of the family Asteraceae. It is most often grown as a leaf vegetable, but sometimes for its stem and seeds. Lettuce is most often used for salads, although it is also seen in other kinds of food, ...

radish The radish (''Raphanus raphanistrum'' subsp. ''sativus'') is an Eating, edible root vegetable of the family Brassicaceae that was domesticated in Asia prior to Roman Empire, Roman times. Radishes are grown and consumed throughout the world, be ...

es and cress may be grown, and

herb In general use, herbs are a widely distributed and widespread group of plants, excluding vegetables and other plants consumed for macronutrients, with savory or aromatic properties that are used for flavoring and garnishing food, for medicinal ...

s or

flower A flower, sometimes known as a bloom or blossom, is the reproductive structure found in flowering plants (plants of the division Angiospermae). The biological function of a flower is to facilitate reproduction, usually by providing a mechani ...

s such as marigolds can absorb sunlight to decrease desiccation of the planter; that is, preventing drying out. Unsuited are lettuce,

peas The pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the flowering plant species ''Pisum sativum''. Each pod contains several peas, which can be green or yellow. Botanically, pea pods are fruit, since they contain seeds and d ...

and

carrot The carrot ('' Daucus carota'' subsp. ''sativus'') is a root vegetable, typically orange in color, though purple, black, red, white, and yellow cultivars exist, all of which are domesticated forms of the wild carrot, ''Daucus carota'', nat ...

s as they do not generally do well, grown upside-down. There are some commercial products that help with upside-down gardening, including the

Topsy Turvy ''Topsy-Turvy'' is a 1999 British musical period drama film written and directed by Mike Leigh, starring Allan Corduner as Sir Arthur Sullivan and Jim Broadbent as W.S. Gilbert, along with Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville and Ron Cook. The st ...

; and there's also fairly easy instructions on how to construct them at home.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Urban Garden CasualCheap Vegetable Gardener
Types of garden Landscape architecture

Advantages over normal gardening

Suitable plantings

See also

References

External links