Is an Indoor Tower Garden Right for You?
It's easy to dream about growing fresh herbs and vegetables in indoor spaces. You imagine having all sorts of wonderful plants providing you with fresh ingredients for all those great meals you're going to make. So you get the pots, the soil, the watering can...and soon, you realize that you haven't got the room to grow plants. Surface area runs out pretty quickly when you have big pots and drip pans and bushy plants growing everywhere. The solution for many is indoor tower gardens. Using vertical space to grow indoor plants is an easy and natural solution. And let's face it, you're always going to need as much surface space as you can get.
Gardening Upwards
Windowsills aren't all that wide and you probably don't have a ton of areas in your home that get great sunlight for most of the day. But you do have a couple of spots that get a lot of sun. Usually, there's not already a convenient table you aren't using sitting in that perfect sunny spot. Forget about using surface area to grow plants and start growing up with tower gardening. This trend is catching on more and more with houseplant enthusiasts. With a tower garden, you can grow a whole selection of herbs, greens and other types of plants you may want to share your home with.
Tower gardens are designed to take up vertical space without taking up a lot of horizontal space. These gardens don't spread out, they go up. There are all sorts of ways to grow a tower garden. You can create a tower garden simply by securing pots to a wall with a nail and hammer. If each pot has drip holes and all the pots are perfectly lined up one below the other, excess water will run down through all the plants. This is why tower gardens are designed in a "stacked" style with plants in a straight vertical line. It's a water-saving design as well as a space-saving one, which has made tower gardens trendy with environmentalists.
Tower Garden Styles
The "stacked" tower garden design has a distinct look and it's pretty easy to set up and maintain. All you need is three or more containers of a similar size or the exact same size. They can be mounted on a wall, a door, a beam, even on a tall piece of furniture. However, many indoor garden enthusiasts love the tower look as well. Tower gardens can also be true towers. Start with a central cylinder that has many holes in it throughout. Add pots at intervals all along the length of the tower to grow multiple plants in the same place. This creates a lot of greenery and makes for a pretty interesting design that can be very appealing, especially when you mix and match different plants to create a pattern of colors and textures.
Tower gardens can be extremely simple or highly sophisticated, purchased in do-it-yourself kits or as whole structures. Some tower gardens are designed to look like multi-tiered pyramids reminiscent of ancient architecture, while others are skinny and designed with their own lighting systems included in highly futuristic-looking styles.
The beauty of tower gardens is that they can look however you want. They’re also a great DIY project because you can create your own tower garden using just a few materials and a little creativity. PVC pipe is an excellent material for making a DIY tower garden because it's easy to work with and widely available at home improvement stores. You can drill holes into PVC pretty easily to provide spaces to hang pots. Simple mesh shelving can become a tower garden with a little ingenuity.
There's no limit to how tower gardens can look at what you can grow in them, save perhaps the really bushy vines and the really tall vegetable plants. Once you start experimenting with tower gardening, you may find that this is the perfect solution to houseplants and a really fun way to get creative and show off your DIY skills.
