Vertical Vegetables

by Amy Andrychowicz

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

Vertical Vegetables is a DIY tutorial guide for gardeners who want to increase the efficiency of their space use. The book contains numerous projects for hardscaping extra usable growing space vertically by incorporating trellises, living walls, towers, vertical containers and hanging planters.

Released 6th Nov 2018 by Quarto on their Cool Springs imprint, it's 192 pages and available in ebook and paperback formats. Author Amy Andrychowicz is a gardening and DIY blogger and this book showcases those talents well.

I'm one of those people who spends a LOT of time in the garden. I have drawings and plans and notes all over the place and generally fill in a couple of journals a year with ideas and plans to try next year. I'm also the person who is critically short of planting space and can usually be found wandering around in my garden with a plant in hand trying to find a little space to slot it into. This book is full of creative ideas and tutorials for spreading planting space upwards instead of outwards.

Like any DIY book, not all of the ideas will be practical for all applications or gardens. There are quite a few which were intriguing to me and look nice or have enough whimsy and humor to fit well into my very informal garden.

The intro covers concepts and benefits of vertical gardening and takes up about 12% of the page content. There's a chapter on plant selection, followed by tutorials on building and using trellises and other structures. The next chapter covers living walls and hanging gardens and the book finishes up with a chapter on container gardening.

The entire book is peppered with full color photographs of healthy and appealing plantings and structures. This is a nice resource for inspiration pictures as well and includes a lot of material which can be adapted to suit most needs.

This book is slanted toward the suburban gardener. There are clever ideas for increasing planting space in attractive ways, but readers are not really likely to increase food yields overwhelmingly. Decorative plantings intermingled with herbs and some small fruits would be ideal and provide at least some food and flowers for use.

There is an adaptable trellis box planter which could easily be used with raised beds which could potentially produce vegetables if used with succession planting.

Lot of good ideas here, many of which are good starting points.

Four stars.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.