My husband saw a program on television demonstrating how to make a flower tower, so he thought he’d make his own. We have many large pots in the shed that we aren’t using now that we have the vegetable garden fenced in and no longer need to grow vegetables in pots. We also had extra landscape fabric and wire mesh, so we had all the ingredients on hand, except for the flowers.
A flower tower is a vertical garden. The idea is to make a tall tube using the wire, landscape fabric, soil and a pot. You cut little pockets into the fabric, and the wire holds the plants in place. They grow into the tower of soil and eventually cascade over the edges. One of the major home stores has a commercial on television now showing a young couple creating a flower tower. Theirs looks quite different from ours because they’ve chosen enormous plants. Remember, I’m cheap – er, frugal – so I bought six packs of petunias at Wal-Mart for something like $1.67 to fill my flower tower.
What You’ll Need to Build a Flower Tower
- Large pot with holes in the bottom for drainage
- 1″ wire mesh to make the tube
- Landscape fabric
- Soil and compost to fill the pot and tube.
- Twist ties
- Scissors
- Annuals such as petunias
Make sure you have everything you need to build your flower tower, because there’s nothing worse than starting a project only to realize halfway through that you’ve run out of materials.
Move the pot to the place where you want it to be all summer long. Make sure it has good sunlight. Once the pot is filled, it’s too heavy to move easily. Place rocks on the bottom of the pot. Fill pot with 50/50 soil and compost mixture.
Take the wire mesh and bend it into a column. Place it into the pot.
Place the landscape fabric around the wire mesh. Cut it to size. Cut a small hole in the fabric. Slip the twist ties through and tie the fabric to the wire, as shown above.
Tie the fabric to the top, too, so it won’t slip down, as shown above.
Now fill the column with soil and compost until it reaches the top. Cut small X-shaped slits into the fabric at regular intervals. Poke your fingers into the soil and push the plants in, root-side first, then tuck the dirt and fabric around each plant, like a little pocket.
Here’s a close up of the fabric “pockets” we made:
Once the tower is planted, plant several petunias on the top.
The last step is to water it – and I mean water it. I saved empty plastic milk and juice containers and keep them filled with water and near the tower so that it’s easy for me to douse the whole thing with water. I water from the top so that the water eventually trickles down and out through the pockets, watering the roots, but I also splash the sides, especially the lower plants, with water. Rainwater gets the whole thing watered evenly.
That’s it! It took us about an hour to build and plant our flower tower. So far, our patriotic red, white and blue theme of petunias is doing well. They haven’t completely covered the flower tower yet the way the ones in the television show and commercial do, but they started with gigantic plants. I think by July, our tower should be growing very well. I’ll post update pictures as it grows.
Have you built a vertical garden? If so, how did it grow?
