Creative Gardening Techniques for Grow up in small spaces Book Review

I love this book! It gets a solid 5 out of 5 from me..  and I see that it has a solid 4.7 out of 5 on amazon.. there is a reason for that.. it’s just a great book.

I bought the book myself, it was not gifted, you can click on the link to the book and it will NOT give me anything.. I got no reward of any kind for this review.. its just mine.

Its got all the basic ways to use vertical grow up, its got a nice selection of traditional ways to build and use them. It also has a non traditional chapter with more funky things.. they are cute and would work for a backyard but they all have a flaw in regards to getting the best results.

The meat of the book as far as I am consider is the fact that the it goes into detail on all kinds of different climbing plants from the normal things like beans/pea’s and cucumbers, but into squash and melons, tomato’s and there is a lovely basic area on fruiting canes and grapes as well.

However there is one little flaw in this book just a touch.. its focused on small backyard gardens.. but its got all the bones to it..

We are going to take those bones and we are going to come back to the book for the smaller backyard recommends and their photos, and then I am going to scale it up!

It sounds easy right.. we will just scale it up.. and it can be to point.. however there are challenges to scaling up to a feed your family, there is challenges when you are using heritage seeds that can have different things needed for them.

While we all adore that different heritage seeds can produce plants that are tougher, more zoned in and with amazing different flavours.. they also can be all over the place in terms of the tweeks required to grow them at their most successful.

Standard seeds tend to middle of the road growers, which works great for many years and for many folks.. its nice to have a good solid understanding of row sizing and spacing.. I have learned that when I am working with Heritage, they can come in pretty un-standard.

I have had packaging tell me 4 feet and they grew 10 to 12 feet when given the chance. I have had other tell me that they need less or more space. Sometimes its the packaging but just as often is that the plants are just not “bred” as tight.

I think many of us are going to be working on scaling up our returns out of the garden this year and for the years to come.  I will link back to this post on the different posts as I want to give credit to the book each time as the starting point 🙂

I am also going to make it a little fun.. I am going to give my email address in spring and ask that anyone who makes any these send me photos to share in the posts and hopefully we can all make a few things this spring, report back and show our fall results.