Walls, Trellises, and Arbors

Don't forget you can make use of walls. Shelving can be nailed to wood or brick walls and tables can lean against them. Ivy is easy to start and comes back every year. So do grape arbors, if help is available to get one started. Consider the side of your house or garage. A fence will support hanging baskets, creeping flowers, and bushes. Trellises and trellis boxes come ready-made at any garden center so you can train creeping flowers, ivies and vegetables. If you're handy, try pounding stakes into the ground to create a teepee; use it for a trellis or a hanger. For more ideas to make gardening do-able, visit public and private gardens whenever you can.

Vertical Gardens

A vertical garden is an attractive way to bring plants closer to a seated gardener. One can be built to stand alone or connect to a load-bearing wall or fence. Vertical gardens can provide shade or a partition to your yard. To see one for the first time is fascinating because plants grow sideways, perpendicular to the ground (in a compartmentalized structure). For watering, the vertical garden is soaked from the top and doesn't dry out as fast because there's less exposure to the air. Soil is covered with plastic to hold it in place, and then covered with mesh and a wood structure like the ones shown below. To plant, the gardener makes a slit in each compartment to insert a transplant. Only young transplants are used rather than seeds to train growth forward.