Vertical Garden Build

SQWIBB · February 27, 2018

I was hoping to build a 55 gallon drum composting vertical garden last year. I had so much going on with the hydroponics and Aquaponics and my regular gardening that I put it on hold, Well I have been researching this a ton this year hoping to build one.

One of the problems I am facing is, where the hell will I put it? I literally have no room. Well I figured since it wasn't a permanent structure I could always move it or empty it at the end of the season and store it on my back hill.

What I have found out during my research this year changed my mind on how to make this. Much of my research about the composting part, primarily the worms needed, (red Wigglers) scared me off. I won't go into the science, but what scared me off was the fact that they may not survive my Zone 7 and that the amount of composting they would do in that small of an area (4-6" pipe) is negligible, so it really didn't seem worth the extra effort. I'm gonna put the extra effort into a center wicking pipe.

For composting I'm gonna stick to what I know.

Anyhow I figured this would be a fun project for My son and I and I'll let him take care of it this season.

This design will be simple, a standard 55 gallon drum, top cut off with 40 slots for plants. Center pipe will be added and capped at the bottom with a few tiny holes in the pipe at each level and wrapped in pond underlayment for wicking. I will drill a few holes in the bottom of the barrel to allow for drainage.

When I got home and made my way past the swamp, (lotsa rain), I climbed up on the hill to pull out the 55 gallon drum earmarked for this project. When I was sorting through all of the junk on the hill I came across one of my 20 gallon drums that I use for storing pool supplies, hoses, fittings, hardware and such. Since I am getting rid of the pool I decided that this would be our first Tower Garden. The barrel is in bad shape it has a couple breaks in the side that I will need to work around.

Lets get started,

Garden Tower 1

I cleaned and marked the barrel...mostly eyeballing it.

Then I was wondering what to use to cut the slits. I figured a jig saw and then said nah, I don't want to drill starter holes, then I contemplated a circular saw, nope... I wanted to do this with my son and a trip to the ER was not sounding good. How about an angle grinder with a thin blade?...nah, probably melt too much when cutting due to the high rpms, Sawzall, nope ER. Biscuit joiner...nope. I got it I'll use my Fein Multimaster..check it out here. Pretty incredible tool.

This is the blade I should have used, I used this on my 2nd tower after this blade broke at the welds.

The slits are cut, I had Stephen cut one of the slits and since it's an oscillating blade it was pretty tough so I took over the cutting.

Stephen manned the heat gun and I manned the beer bottles.

You could really make this fun and start with full beer bottles!!!

There we go, 24 slots, I decided not to put the 6 slots in the bottom, due to the taper and it being a little tight, we figured we could do 24 strawberries in the slots and 6 around the top for a total of 30 or 24 strawberries and 2-3 pepper plants, that's plenty.

Next up was paint... hmmm. what should we use, I really like the Krylon Fusion Terra Cotta Spray Paint... well guess what, it has been discontinued, like I was surprised.

I'll see what I got in the workshop and come up with something... maybe nutmeg will look nice.

I sanded the drum with a 220 grit and wiped down with vinegar.

I had Stephen cut out some templates that I had printed out that I found online

But he was too busy to help his dad and only cut a few of the butterflies out so I had to reuse several of them once the paint dried on one side.

The drum is then painted with a primer and then spot painted with various colors.

The templates are tossed on and the entire barrel is painted with a nutmeg spray paint.

I kinda like the barrel with all the different colors, I was undecided so I let my Daughter make the decision and she liked the nutmeg with the butterflies.

Barrel is flipped and a few Holes were drilled in the bottom for drainage. As mentioned earlier I decided not to do the composting section but liked the idea of something in the center so I wouldn't need a whole lot of potting mix, What I did here was use a 4" piece of PVC, Capped the bottom and drilled 1/64" holes in it to slowly weep into the soil, I cheeped out on the cap and used a Mayo Lid, I wasn't about to spend $7.00 on a cap.

I finished working on the wicking tube for the 20 gallon, this tube holds about 1.5 gallons. A few 1/16" holes are drilled in the tube, then its wrapped with Pond Underlayment and secure with polyester twine. Not pretty but you wont see it.

I decided to use this Toro water timer and connect it to the 55 gallon tank that was intended for the Self Watering Air Pruning system. A 5 foot hose runs from the timer down into the wicking tube. As of now it cycles every 24 hours for one minute, I have the Timer hooked into a "Y" so I can throttle the flow back a bit or increase as needed as the lowest setting is one minute. I timed it so that the self wicking tube will fill up and overflow for about 10 seconds then kick off. I am sure this will change with head pressure as the water drops in the barrel and weather conditions.

Garden Tower 2

I decided to make another vertical garden for herbs, I didn't want to hack up my other 20 gallon barrel for two reasons, one is that I use it for my fish tanks and when working on my pond, the other reason is if I'm not happy with the results, I wasted a good holding tank. This will not have a wicking tube and I will see how often it needs watering before I make it a self watering garden.

The bottom was worn through so I glued with some landscape adhesive.

Then it was time to paint.

SQWIBB · February 27, 2018

March 28th, 2016 - Today I planted 25 Seascape Strawberry plants. I used a mix of potting soil, peat moss and perlite.

April 5th, 2016 - Well, nothing has died yet.

April 20th, 2016 - I lost one plant and another was on the brink of death but pulled through, I should have pushed the roots into the center more instead of downward. I started watering every few days to keep the soil moist in an effort to get the roots better established. I added a Datil Pepper plant and Tabasco Pepper plant to the top.

April 25th, 2016 - I may add some fertilizer to the 55 gallon reservoir that feeds the strawberry tower.

May 5th, 2016 - The Strawberry Plants seem to be doing well, the top right is a "Tabasco pepper" and the Top Left is a "Datil Pepper".

May 20th, 2016 -

June 4th, 2016 - I decided to ditch the NFT Rails and planted the 24 strawberry plants everywhere I had some space, birds were getting int the berries so I put on some bird netting, I need to find something better because I am afraid the turtles will get stuck in the netting...they see the red strawberries and start climbing to reach them. Strawberries are favorite food of Box Turtles and I do feed some of the strawberries to the turtles.

SQWIBB · February 27, 2018

Garden Tower 2

April 20th, 2016 - I wasn't going to use this tower but had so many orphan plants that I decided to just toss them in here to see if they make it... they are mostly peppers. I'll have to come up with a self watering setup for this tower... I can see this tower drying out in a day or two!

I may try and hook this into the drip irrigation system by running a line under ground and off of the deck post.

April 28th, 2016 - I'm actually impressed with these towers so far. I was reluctant to plant up the small tower, but I am glad I did. The smaller tower has a mish-mosh of plants in it that would have been tossed.

May 5th, 2016 - Everything is in here lol...

May 15th, 2016 - Ran a 1/4" irrigation line to the tower, I used a 1/2" piece of copper with a few slits and fed a 4 foot piece of emitter tubing into the pipe, the line is valved.

May 20th, 2016 -

June 4th, 2016 - This Parris Island Romaine blows my mind, I will be harvesting this week for Roll Ups for lunches.

July 27th, 2016 - I am really pleased with these tower gardens. They really need to be cleaned up a bit.

Ghost Chili

Summary -

Although this tower has drip irrigation installed, it needs to be watered manually until the roots are somewhat established. I will be modifying the watering tube next year.

SQWIBB · February 27, 2018

2017 Vertical Garden Pics

Tower 1
July 12th

August 15th

I don't get many Strawberries from the tower, but just enough to snack and and give the turtles a treat.

I gotta say as far as the jalapeno plant goes, it produced all summer.

I ended up with 4 harvests and approximately 66 peppers on this one plant.

Last Harvest being prepped for ABT's and Pickling.

I didn't grow the Bacon, because no one had Bacon seeds, I'm still looking.

Tower 2
August 15th

Tower 2 got me some parsley a few misc. peppers and some Tabasco peppers, nothing to write home about. This year I will be dumping the soil and remixing in some fresh soil.
I'm going to leave garden 2 go another year and top dress with my compost.

oakley · February 27, 2018

That is fantastic. You are 'crushing it'. Such great ideas for a small
space. And resourceful.

matereater · February 27, 2018

Awesome way to make more garden when you have limited space

ddsack · February 27, 2018

Thanks for sharing your pictures and ideas, never would have thought of the beer bottle/hair dryer tip. So nice to see the good results later in the summer. And of course I'm glad the box turtles got their share of the strawberries.

Muslickz · February 28, 2018

I found em.. Shh.....

lol

-Mus

P.S. You know I'm gonna have to make one of these now..

SQWIBB · March 1, 2018

Quote:

Originally Posted by oakley

That is fantastic. You are 'crushing it'. Such great ideas for a small
space. And resourceful.

Thank you for the kind words

Quote:

Originally Posted by matereater

Awesome way to make more garden when you have limited space

Yeah its getting tougher and tougher to find places to plant, and thank you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ddsack

Thanks for sharing your pictures and ideas, never would have thought of the beer bottle/hair dryer tip. So nice to see the good results later in the summer. And of course I'm glad the box turtles got their share of the strawberries.

Whats nice is you can take your time when making, this using full bottles, drink a beer and place in the hole, continue until finished lol.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Muslickz

I found em.. Shh.....

lol

-Mus

P.S. You know I'm gonna have to make one of these now..

Do you plant those with the snout sticking out of the ground?

Please take some photos and post if you do make one.

kilroyscarnival · October 15, 2019

Just found this vintage thread! We are working on making our own garden tower out of a 55-gallon food grade drum that had food-safe glycerin in it. The slots had been cut for a couple of weeks but we were struggling with a blow torch, and instead got a heat gun which is working much better to melt and stretch the holes. Like you, I was concerned about the sustainability of a worm farm inside it, but perhaps for opposite reasons. I wasn't sure it would stay cool enough throughout, this being Florida. So, we're opting to build an olla out of silicon-connected terra cotta pots (really an hourglass-shaped double olla out of four 8" pots, two sets cemented mouth to mouth and then connected drain-hole-to-drain-hole.) We've built a wheeled caddy for it so that we can rotate it. I really thought it would be done a month ago, but my boyfriend kept putting it off. It's great to see what you've done with yours! I'm hoping to do some strawberries, salad greens, and some peas along the bottom.

February 27, 2018	#1
SQWIBB Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2018 Location: Philly 7A Posts: 739	Vertical Garden Build I was hoping to build a 55 gallon drum composting vertical garden last year. I had so much going on with the hydroponics and Aquaponics and my regular gardening that I put it on hold, Well I have been researching this a ton this year hoping to build one. One of the problems I am facing is, where the hell will I put it? I literally have no room. Well I figured since it wasn't a permanent structure I could always move it or empty it at the end of the season and store it on my back hill. What I have found out during my research this year changed my mind on how to make this. Much of my research about the composting part, primarily the worms needed, (red Wigglers) scared me off. I won't go into the science, but what scared me off was the fact that they may not survive my Zone 7 and that the amount of composting they would do in that small of an area (4-6" pipe) is negligible, so it really didn't seem worth the extra effort. I'm gonna put the extra effort into a center wicking pipe. For composting I'm gonna stick to what I know. Anyhow I figured this would be a fun project for My son and I and I'll let him take care of it this season. This design will be simple, a standard 55 gallon drum, top cut off with 40 slots for plants. Center pipe will be added and capped at the bottom with a few tiny holes in the pipe at each level and wrapped in pond underlayment for wicking. I will drill a few holes in the bottom of the barrel to allow for drainage. When I got home and made my way past the swamp, (lotsa rain), I climbed up on the hill to pull out the 55 gallon drum earmarked for this project. When I was sorting through all of the junk on the hill I came across one of my 20 gallon drums that I use for storing pool supplies, hoses, fittings, hardware and such. Since I am getting rid of the pool I decided that this would be our first Tower Garden. The barrel is in bad shape it has a couple breaks in the side that I will need to work around. Lets get started, Garden Tower 1 I cleaned and marked the barrel...mostly eyeballing it. Then I was wondering what to use to cut the slits. I figured a jig saw and then said nah, I don't want to drill starter holes, then I contemplated a circular saw, nope... I wanted to do this with my son and a trip to the ER was not sounding good. How about an angle grinder with a thin blade?...nah, probably melt too much when cutting due to the high rpms, Sawzall, nope ER. Biscuit joiner...nope. I got it I'll use my Fein Multimaster..check it out here. Pretty incredible tool. This is the blade I should have used, I used this on my 2nd tower after this blade broke at the welds. The slits are cut, I had Stephen cut one of the slits and since it's an oscillating blade it was pretty tough so I took over the cutting. Stephen manned the heat gun and I manned the beer bottles. You could really make this fun and start with full beer bottles!!! There we go, 24 slots, I decided not to put the 6 slots in the bottom, due to the taper and it being a little tight, we figured we could do 24 strawberries in the slots and 6 around the top for a total of 30 or 24 strawberries and 2-3 pepper plants, that's plenty. Next up was paint... hmmm. what should we use, I really like the Krylon Fusion Terra Cotta Spray Paint... well guess what, it has been discontinued, like I was surprised. I'll see what I got in the workshop and come up with something... maybe nutmeg will look nice. I sanded the drum with a 220 grit and wiped down with vinegar. I had Stephen cut out some templates that I had printed out that I found online But he was too busy to help his dad and only cut a few of the butterflies out so I had to reuse several of them once the paint dried on one side. The drum is then painted with a primer and then spot painted with various colors. The templates are tossed on and the entire barrel is painted with a nutmeg spray paint. I kinda like the barrel with all the different colors, I was undecided so I let my Daughter make the decision and she liked the nutmeg with the butterflies. Barrel is flipped and a few Holes were drilled in the bottom for drainage. As mentioned earlier I decided not to do the composting section but liked the idea of something in the center so I wouldn't need a whole lot of potting mix, What I did here was use a 4" piece of PVC, Capped the bottom and drilled 1/64" holes in it to slowly weep into the soil, I cheeped out on the cap and used a Mayo Lid, I wasn't about to spend $7.00 on a cap. I finished working on the wicking tube for the 20 gallon, this tube holds about 1.5 gallons. A few 1/16" holes are drilled in the tube, then its wrapped with Pond Underlayment and secure with polyester twine. Not pretty but you wont see it. I decided to use this Toro water timer and connect it to the 55 gallon tank that was intended for the Self Watering Air Pruning system. A 5 foot hose runs from the timer down into the wicking tube. As of now it cycles every 24 hours for one minute, I have the Timer hooked into a "Y" so I can throttle the flow back a bit or increase as needed as the lowest setting is one minute. I timed it so that the self wicking tube will fill up and overflow for about 10 seconds then kick off. I am sure this will change with head pressure as the water drops in the barrel and weather conditions. Garden Tower 2 I decided to make another vertical garden for herbs, I didn't want to hack up my other 20 gallon barrel for two reasons, one is that I use it for my fish tanks and when working on my pond, the other reason is if I'm not happy with the results, I wasted a good holding tank. This will not have a wicking tube and I will see how often it needs watering before I make it a self watering garden. The bottom was worn through so I glued with some landscape adhesive. Then it was time to paint.

February 27, 2018	#3
SQWIBB Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2018 Location: Philly 7A Posts: 739	Vertical Garden 2 Garden Tower 2 April 20th, 2016 - I wasn't going to use this tower but had so many orphan plants that I decided to just toss them in here to see if they make it... they are mostly peppers. I'll have to come up with a self watering setup for this tower... I can see this tower drying out in a day or two! I may try and hook this into the drip irrigation system by running a line under ground and off of the deck post. April 28th, 2016 - I'm actually impressed with these towers so far. I was reluctant to plant up the small tower, but I am glad I did. The smaller tower has a mish-mosh of plants in it that would have been tossed. May 5th, 2016 - Everything is in here lol... May 15th, 2016 - Ran a 1/4" irrigation line to the tower, I used a 1/2" piece of copper with a few slits and fed a 4 foot piece of emitter tubing into the pipe, the line is valved. May 20th, 2016 - June 4th, 2016 - This Parris Island Romaine blows my mind, I will be harvesting this week for Roll Ups for lunches. July 27th, 2016 - I am really pleased with these tower gardens. They really need to be cleaned up a bit. Ghost Chili Summary - Although this tower has drip irrigation installed, it needs to be watered manually until the roots are somewhat established. I will be modifying the watering tube next year.

February 27, 2018	#6
matereater Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jul 2006 Location: S.E. Michigan (Livonia) Posts: 1,264	Awesome way to make more garden when you have limited space __________________ Steve Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult

February 27, 2018	#7
ddsack Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jan 2006 Location: Northern Minnesota - zone 3 Posts: 3,231	Thanks for sharing your pictures and ideas, never would have thought of the beer bottle/hair dryer tip. So nice to see the good results later in the summer. And of course I'm glad the box turtles got their share of the strawberries. __________________ Dee **************

February 28, 2018	#8
Muslickz Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jun 2012 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 68	I found em.. Shh..... lol -Mus P.S. You know I'm gonna have to make one of these now.. Last edited by Muslickz; February 28, 2018 at 11:19 PM.

February 27, 2018	#5
oakley Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Jun 2015 Location: NewYork 5a Posts: 2,303	That is fantastic. You are 'crushing it'. Such great ideas for a small space. And resourceful.

October 15, 2019	#10
kilroyscarnival Tomatovillian™ Join Date: Oct 2012 Location: Orlando, FL Posts: 614	Just found this vintage thread! We are working on making our own garden tower out of a 55-gallon food grade drum that had food-safe glycerin in it. The slots had been cut for a couple of weeks but we were struggling with a blow torch, and instead got a heat gun which is working much better to melt and stretch the holes. Like you, I was concerned about the sustainability of a worm farm inside it, but perhaps for opposite reasons. I wasn't sure it would stay cool enough throughout, this being Florida. So, we're opting to build an olla out of silicon-connected terra cotta pots (really an hourglass-shaped double olla out of four 8" pots, two sets cemented mouth to mouth and then connected drain-hole-to-drain-hole.) We've built a wheeled caddy for it so that we can rotate it. I really thought it would be done a month ago, but my boyfriend kept putting it off. It's great to see what you've done with yours! I'm hoping to do some strawberries, salad greens, and some peas along the bottom. Last edited by kilroyscarnival; October 16, 2019 at 01:52 PM.