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By Hilda, on July 22nd, 2011
 A cucumber vine reaches for the sky on natural lattice panels Among vegetable gardeners who have limited growing space, tomatoes definitely seem to be a favorite crop – you can find room for a tomato plant or two just about anywhere, even if you have to tuck it into a flower bed or grow it in a container on a sunny terrace.
But what about veggies that like to sprawl out over a large area, like cucumbers? Look up the spacing requirements for them, and you’ll find a single cucumber plant can spread out over 12 to 20 square feet when grown in traditional rows.
One way to make better use of space and maximize yields is to grow vertically – that is, to let your vining plants expand upward instead of outward, by supporting them on a raised structure. It’s a perfect solution for anyone growing in containers, raised beds, or other small plots of land (like a narrow side yard).
The best and easiest candidates for vertical growing are beans, cucumbers, and all kinds of summer squash (like zucchini and the common yellow crookneck varieties).
Winter squash varieties (acorn, butternut, Hubbard) can also be grown vertically, but you’ll have to find a way to support the heavy fruits as they ripen. The same goes for pumpkins and melons — these extra-large fruits can present their own challenges when they don’t have a spot on the ground to rest on.
There are other benefits to vertical growing as well. When plants are raised off the ground, leaves are less susceptible to slug damage. Since foliage dries off faster after a rain, fungal problems are reduced. And, your vertically-grown plants may have more leaf surface area exposed to the sun, resulting in better growth.
The most important way to ensure success with vertical growing is this: Know the difference between vining and bush varieties of the same crop – not all varieties have been bred to grow upward!
Some specific tips to keep in mind for climbing vegetables:
- Beans. There is a huge difference between bush beans and pole beans. Bush beans are relatively short, self-supporting plants that don’t climb. They have been bred specifically for commercial farmers; their lower height makes harvesting by machine easier. Pole beans, however, can climb to ten feet or more – and the added height means you can harvest twice as many beans, from the same amount of space.
 Pole beans grow on a simple, home-made support
- Cucumbers. Choose seeds or seedlings carefully, and don’t end up with a “bush”variety. While bush varieties are still sprawling plants, they’re not really climbers. Instead, they put out vines that radiate only three feet out from the plant’s center – meaning they require only 9 square feet of space, about a third of what a vining cucumber needs when grown flat. In this way they’re considered “space-saving” types. But choose a vining cucumber variety to grow vertically, and you can grow one to two plants in just one square foot of space. For more specific tips on growing cucumbers vertically, see BluestoneGarden’s post on Urban Organic Gardener.
- Zucchini and crookneck squash. There are a few heirloom varieties of zucchini and other kinds of summer squash that are prolific, vining climbers. Most types, however, tend to be sprawling, bushy plants that want to grow flat but can be coaxed into growing vertically with a little bit of effort (you’ll have to tie the stems to your trellis). Just be sure to avoid those that are labeled as “space-spacing” varieties; they’ve been bred specifically to grow horizontally. And if you don’t have immediate success growing summer squash vertically, try a different variety next year, till you find one that works for you.
 Zucchini fruit and flower
In general, you’ll need plant supports of at least six to eight feet tall for cucumbers and squash; taller for pole beans. It’s best to start out with your growing structure already in place, and then set out plants at its base – you’re less likely to damage roots this way than if you try to anchor a support into place once the plants are already established and growing.
As you experiment with vertical growing, you can create your own plant supports from materials you have on hand — dowels, bamboo poles, wire, twine, etc. You can also grow vertically on a chain link fence, or on a trellis mounted to the side of a shed or garage. If you have an arch or arbor framing a walkway or gate, consider using it to support scarlet runner beans, which are both edible and decorative, with their bright red flowers. And if you’d rather purchase your growing supports, there’s a wide range of functional and decorative products on the market. For very narrow spaces (against a fence, in planter boxes, etc.), a fan trellis allows you to grow straight up and flat. In raised beds or large containers, a tall obelisk is both functional and decorative.
By Hilda, on September 21st, 2010
The autumnal equinox, that celestial event that officially marks the end of summer, is fast approaching — it falls on Wednesday, September 22nd this year. But it was just after Labor Day, which for many people is really summer’s grand finale, that I started noticing the fluffy white blooms of sweet autumn clematis around my neighborhood. Here it is clambering around a white picket fence in a suburban front yard.
Sweet autumn clematis is aptly named — the plentiful white flowers put out a sweet, clean scent that perfumes the air without becoming overpowering. This is a naturally occurring species, not one of the large-flowered, hybrid clematis varieties that you see growing on mailbox posts everywhere. And of course, the taxonomists can’t agree on what to actually call this species, so I’ve given up on trying to follow their peculiar logic and now rely on just the common name (at various times this fragrant vine has been known as Clematis terniflora, C. paniculata, and the oh-so-unpronounceable C. maximowicziana).
This clematis is an ambitious grower, not well suited for the mailbox — instead, plant it on fences, arbors, trellises, or tall shrubs. Even when cut back hard (to within 12 inches of the ground) in late winter or early spring, it can put out 20 feet or more of new growth in a single season. In fact, this kind of drastic pruning is recommended, not only to keep the plant under control, but to encourage heavy flowering.
During a warm fall, the flowering season can go on and on. Flowers are followed by fluffy, silver seedheads — and if you don’t want little baby clematis springing up all over your yard, you can shear the vine before the seeds ripen and float off in the wind. Alternatively, you can just pull out stray seedlings when you do your spring weeding. Either toss them on the compost heap, or give them away to gardening friends.
Sweet autumn clematis grows well in zones 5 through 10. In warmer climates, it’s sometimes considered invasive, but I find it’s very easy to keep this vine restrained — it’s not at all like wisteria or trumpet vine (Campsis radicans), which are true thugs indeed.
For more pictures of sweet autumn clematis, visit Sandra Jonas’ blog. She’s a better photographer than I am, and she grows this vine on one end of a brick veranda that graces her antebellum home, for a stunning effect.
By Hilda, on September 6th, 2010
Vines are probably the most versatile landscape plants around. No other plants can be used to create such a wide variety of effects.
Vines can soften and link architectural structures like arbors, fences, arches, and walls to the yards or gardens around them. They can also be used creatively to provide shade, privacy, flowers, ground cover, or fragrance.
I’ve seen vines described as lazy plants, because they have to rely on other plants or structures for support — but I’ve always thought of them as ambitious plants that will aim for the sky.
Here are a few creative uses of vines that caught my eye on a recent garden tour.
A stone retaining wall that flanks a narrow driveway is festooned with swags of English ivy. Creative, no doubt, and lots of fun to discover as a visitor to this garden — but this effect would take way too much maintenance for me to be tempted to duplicate it at home!
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Garage doors are always a bit of an eyesore, but I love the way this planting of evergreen Clematis armandii softens the edges a bit. This type of clematis puts out a heavy flush of fragrant pink blooms in the spring.
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Wow! The entire facade of this home is covered with the creeping fig, Ficus pumila.
This is more commonly seen in cities like New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston, where creeping fig is more reliably hardy, than here in Atlanta where I snapped this shot.
Creeping fig is a rather cute plant, with tiny little leaves that remind me of mouse ears. You can see from the close up that there is also a variegated variety, with a narrow margin of white around the leaf edges.
By Hilda, on June 11th, 2010
 For more than ten years now, I’ve grown this wonderful vine from the morning glory family in a pot on my front patio. It’s sometimes known as cypress vine or hummingbird vine, but these common names are so interchangeable that if you want to order seed, it’s best to look for the Latin name: Ipomoea quamoclit.
I fell in love with this adorable climber the first time I saw it in someone’s garden, and immediately asked if I could collect some of the seeds. The feathery fern-like foliage would be stunning on its own, even without the tiny, tubular red flowers that flare out into a five-pointed star. I just love the texture of this plant!
Like most morning glories, this vine is easy to grow. I sowed seeds only once and it’s reseeded itself every year since then. Because I grow it in a container on a metal obelisk, the growth is very restrained, but I’ve seen this vine grow to 20 feet tall against a utility pole on a public street corner – just spectacular!
 Did I mention the red flowers attract hummingbirds? They don’t spend long on individual flowers, which probably only provide a sip of nectar, but once the vine really gets going it’s covered with enough flowers to provide a feast.
The vine has one minor drawback – like most morning glories, the flowers last only a day, opening just after dawn and closing up by early afternoon.
 For those of you who like a more dramatic display, I recommend a morning glory named ‘Heavenly Blue’, which was hybridized from the wild morning glory (Ipomoea tricolor) to bear bigger, more dramatic flowers. A friend of mine grew this on a pierced brick wall last summer and sent me this picture. Another friend used to grow ‘Heavenly Blue’ on a lamppost in her front yard. She’d create a lush pyramid of vines by driving several stakes into the ground around the base of the post, then stringing twine from the stakes to the top of the lamppost. After starting seeds indoors, she’d transplant the seedlings into the ground next to the stakes, coaxing them up the twine as they grew.
 Want to extend the flowery display into the evening hours? Many gardeners in the South, where I live, plant ‘Heavenly Blue’ along with moon vine (Ipomoea alba), mixing the two vines on the same trellis or support. Moon vine is kind of a reverse morning glory – its huge, fragrant, white flowers open at twilight and stay open all night. So when you plant these two related vines together, you get 24 hours of bloom, with a color change in the middle!
Planting tip:
Morning glory seeds have a thick seed coat that can cause them to be slow to germinate. You can speed up the process either by soaking them in water overnight or nicking them slightly with a utility knife (some people use a metal nail file to lightly scratch the seed coat).
By Hilda, on June 3rd, 2010
An article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, of all places, touched on the topic of color in the garden. Interestingly enough, it was built around the premise that:
Blue is the most elusive, most coveted color in gardening, where some of the most skilled practitioners take pleasure in attempting to grow the near-impossible. Much of what passes for blue in the plant world—lavender, lilac, larkspur—is actually a shade of purple.
The author, Anne Marie Chaker, covered quite a bit of ground in her well researched story, even touching on the science and genetics of blue pigments in plants (though she rather lightly skipped past most of the fascinating folklore surrounding the rare Himalayan blue poppy, Meconopsis grandis).
Here in Atlanta, where I live, there seems to be an abundance of blue right now — everywhere you look, yards are filled with blue mophead hydrangeas. Our acidic clay soil keeps the flowers a really true shade of blue — quite pretty, for the most part. When I lived in the Midwest, where the soil was more neutral, hydrangeas were always unappealing, muddy shades of mauve and lavender. (For an explanation of how soil pH affects hydrangea flower color, click here.)
 My final thought: I was surprised to see no mention of the Heavenly Blue morning glory in an article about blue flowers. This is an annual that’s easily grown from seed, and is one of the truest shades of blue around, with hardly a hint of lavender. (Like all morning glories, the flowers of Heavenly Blue open just after dawn and close by early afternoon — one more example of how elusive the color blue can be in the garden!
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About
The Author
Hilda Brucker
 Hilda combines her
love of gardening
and passion for writing
in her blog entries.
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