Are you a city dweller who wants to plant a vegetable garden, but are confined by the small apartment space or small garden space? If you really want to grow your own fresh vegetables, then there is a solution for you.

You should consider planting a vertical vegetable garden right there in your small space. With vertical vegetable gardening, you can easily produce as much produce as the normal garden would and even more.

The vertical vegetable gardens are not a new secret that are easily mistaken with a living wall. As while both living walls and vertical vegetable gardening can be geared towards producing vegetables and fruits, living walls are more focused on beauty than production of food. This form of gardening can be done either in your apartment or in your small backyard garden.

Training Your Vertical Garden

Vertical vegetable gardening involves training vegetable plants to grow upwards. These gardens use structures designed specifically to contain an entire garden within a small, contained space. With the proper frames and cross shelving setups, you will find it's not very difficult at all to train your plants to grow vertically.

There are pre-fabricated vertical gardening kits you can purchase that will remove the guess work in building constructing your setup, but that does not mean you cannot go the do-it-yourself route. If you choose a DIY method, make certain that whatever structure you are using in order to build your vertical vegetable garden is strong enough to hold the materials, soil, water, and plants found in your garden as well as the vegetables you are about to product.

While you can find the specific information online as to the weights of the different elements in your new garden, we find that such kits can often save a lot of time - not only with setup, but they also prevent lost "growing" time that you may encounter with wilted plants that did not receive the proper amounts of water or soil.

Bring Your Garden Indoors

Remember, you do not need limit yourself only to outdoor vertical gardens. While maintaining a vegetable garden inside your apartment or other confined space can be a bit tricky, it's not impossible and can be very rewarding.

Gardening indoors will allow you to plant vegetables that may not be fond of your region's climate, giving you a better variety to choose from when planting. It has also been shown that live plants can effect the air quality in a smaller space.

While it will be necessary to insure you have proper ventilation to prevent any possible odours others have found that they can breath better and are generally calmer because of the increased oxygen emitted by your plants.

If you decide to build your vertical vegetable garden indoors, spend time finding the perfect location, as your plants will need sunlight. If you are in an urban area where buildings block most of the natural light from your patio or windowsills, you will want to invest in lamps produced specifically to aid in growing plants and vegetables.

Get Ready And Get Growing Up!

Also, make sure you have all the supplies needed before starting your garden. This is particularly important in regard to vertical supports for your plants, and seeds will germinate almost immediately and it would be best to not disturb the soil to add supports at a later date.

You wall to make sure that your designated vertical vegetable garden is not closely entwined with shrubs or other plants that may divert water away from your produce or cast shadows over their sunlight. Once again, after some time, these issues may not be of a primary concern, but they should be noted by all beginners looking to start their first vertical garden.

If you are interested in truly organic gardening, you'll also want to research how you can apply composting procedures to the soil used in your vertical gardens. A proper drainage system is a necessity, as well as very good air circulation (whether indoors or out).

NASA scientists have been researching different vertical gardening methods, which means that the supplies and processes of how to grow vegetables and herbs vertically should continue to improve with the advancement of technology. While large grid systems and advanced hydroponic watering techniques may not offer feasible solutions for your cement porch, we can benefit from the concepts and the ideas they create and can scale them down to fit our own needs.

However, to start your garden, you will want to stick to some simple basics to ensure your success as your begin to learn how to work with your space and your climate restrictions. For starters, look at gardening peas, green beans, cucumber, squash, lima plants, and tomatoes, as these are great climbing plants by design. This doesn't rule out other vegetables for vertical gardening, but they may be more difficult to start off with.

So Fancy Some Grown Up Vegetables?

Vegetable and herb gardening has always been known to offer "green" ways to lower environmental footprint, but those opportunities had been limited by space and region. Luckily, with the new trend of vertical vegetable gardening, those in urban environments can experience that same level of increased self-sufficiency as their produce their own, healthy, fresh grown produce