For over 2,000 years vertical gardening has been wonderful. Since the hanging gardens of Babylon first made the Hellenistic traveler’s bucket list of Seven Wonders, vertical gardens have been admired the world over. But never have there been more reasons to do vertical gardening in your home in San Miguel de Allende.
Vertical Gardening
A vertical garden is any garden that employs vertical space to grow plants. These gardens can breathe tranquility into a small room. Or they can add interest and depth to an expansive area by utilizing a wall, framework, or trellis. They are easy to maintain and can keep delicious homegrown fruits and vegetables within arm’s reach year-round.
There are many ideas to consider when planning your vertical garden. By examining their many advantages, you can choose the approach that best suits your purpose.
Beauty
The primary reason that many people choose to create a wall of greenery is to bring the inherent beauty of nature into personal living spaces. Even a simple, stark wall can be instantly softened and transformed by anchoring a few pots near the top of the wall and filling them with an abundance of trailing pothos.
For a quick project, visit a vivero near your luxury home in San Miguel de Allende, to find specialty planters that can be attached directly to the wall of your choice. These can be anything from canvas pockets, hanging baskets, and rigid frames with pots attached.
Consider vertical gardening as a way to create mid-ground in a larger area, within your field of view. A common gardening trick is to use vertical features to obstruct a portion of the viewer’s line of sight. Thus, you can add depth to a garden’s design. And, like a meandering curved path, you can imbue your San Miguel Allende home with a sense of hidden corners and mystery.
Outdoors, you can choose from an abundance of structural options, such as large frames holding planters, trellises, and walls. Even an old wooden ladder can become a quaint and flexible accessory to make any vertical garden a success. Once firmly propped up against a wall, the rungs can support hanging baskets or become shelves on which to set planters. Or the whole structure can become a trellis.
Ease of maintenance
Watering your plants, checking their soil, and keeping an eye out for pests is easy and painless since vertical features lift your plants closer to eye level. And because the containers allow for air circulation and prevent large swaths of crowded plantings, pests and disease are less likely to appear and slower to spread in your vertical garden.
To keep maintenance to a minimum, be sure to match your plants to their sunlight and shade requirements. For a bright, sunlit garden, you might choose anything from sun-loving cacti to poinsettias. Many native favorites, such as bromeliads, variegated oyster plants, and hibiscus, will thrive in bright, indirect light. Consider options such as cast iron plants, peace lilies, and snake plants for low-light areas.
Cooling and cleaning
A cement wall may shade your home, but it will release the heat for hours after the sun goes down. Plants provide a cooler shade, literally bringing down the temperature by both photosynthesis and transpiration.
Plants redirect around a third of the sun’s rays to fuel the microscopic factories within their leaves, grabbing carbons and sequestering them into sugars and releasing oxygen instead of heat. Each little leaf is a powerhouse that saves you money on your electric bills and lowers your carbon footprint.
As if all that is not enough, those little factories also like to remove any unpleasant substances from the air we breathe. Recent research shows that plants are proven to clean the air of pollution such as formaldehyde, benzene, trichloroethylene, and carbon monoxide. These toxins come from cars, factories, cleaning supplies, and even our own home printers.
Vegetable gardening made easy
Indoors or out, edible plants are a healthy and timeless choice for a vertical garden. Containers eliminate most of the weeding, and the height of the plants reduces the need to kneel and bend. Vertical gardens are especially delightful for observing the plants as your harvest matures, maximizing the pleasure of anticipation and ensuring that you catch each crop at the peak of ripeness.
Imagine vining tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash arcing over lush clusters of leafy greens, flanked by your favorite herbs, peppers, strawberries, and more.
For the best results
Avoid purchasing plants at box store retailers, which tend to be unhealthy and are often poorly suited to the local climate. Visit your local vivero for the best advice and the widest variety of suitable choices.