Posts tagged diy

Outdoor vertical succulent garden

Feb 3rd

Succulent living wall

Joan and William Feldman had a backyard with a little pond in LA, California. However.. it didn’t have enough green for their tastes so they wanted to spice it up a bit. The didn’t have a lot of room.. land prices being what they are.. so they needed a solution to get some green on the bare walls to make them really pop.

Landscape designer Mia Lehrer and her associate, Holly Kuwayama, came up with a solution.. which was to hang a garden on the wall, that could thrive without much soil or water. Succulents were used as they need little water, so they’re light, and they have shallow roots, so not much soil is required.

Vines can take a while to fill up a space.. whereas vertical gardens can be installed relatively quickly. They also have the added advantage of being able to use a bunch of different colors from different plants in the design. They went various nurseries for the right plants to use in the living wall: echeverias and aeoniums, plump sedums and crassulas, senecios and kalanchoes… which all said and done.. provided a lot of interesting colors.

Succulents vertical garden

The designers came up with using a three-by-five-foot steel armature with two layers of metal mesh to create a wide, shallow box. The box was then stuffed with a blend of sphagnum moss and cactus mix to use in place of soil.. and was planted with hundreds of cuttings. About 45 days later, once the plants took root, the living wall was ready to mount, with eyebolts and heavy brackets.

For maintenance.. all that’s needed is a spray from the hose once a week.. fertilizer isn’t needed at all. The only issue they had was some of the aeoniums grew a bit too big to keep the uniform look of the wall planter.. so they have to be cut back every once and a while.

All in all.. it’s a great design that really makes a small outdoor space green up.

Container Gardening Vertically

Feb 1st

Posted by Gavin in Do it Yourself

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container gardening vertically

Here’s a diy guide to container gardening – vertically. It has 35 containers growing plants.. could even be something like strawberries.. that takes up the footprint the same size as one plant. But since it grows up, this container garden uses less space.

The basic idea is to use PVC piping (you don’t even have to glue/cement it) with holes drilled through to insert galvanized wire. Then you just insert your pots into the loops of the wire and you’re about done.

The guide is from here and that gives a plan of how to build a vertical container garden but I’ll put a run through here. The whole thing can be built for about 20 bucks.

The first step is to get some galvanized wire. Bailing wire will rust. You’ll want to wrap the wire around something to make it a circle. You could use the container pots themselves, or use an abs pipe. You’ll use some kind of pliers to twist the wires together at the ends. Below are some pictures:

Forming the loop

Cutting the wire to the right length

Making the wire ends 90 degrees

You’re going to want to tilt up the twisted part of the wire about 90 degrees. That way when you stick it in the holes in the PVC pipe, it’ll stay put indefinitely.

Next you’re going to assemble the PVC structure. You can customize it to whatever size you want. In the end, you just need some pipes and some T’s.. that’s about it. This one uses 3/4″ PVC and 3/4″ PVC Tees. Stick the ends of the pipes in the T’s as you see fit to build your structure. Then drill some holes in the pipe to insert the tips of the galvanized wire circles. The holes will be 1/8″ to 5/6″ depending on the size of the wire you used. To finish it, just stick the pots in the circles of the wires and you’re done.