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Vertical Gardening Tomatoes– See the Huge Difference!

Turn your backyard garden into a salsa-making factory by growing up rather than out.

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I started using this method after programming some lectures 12 years ago for the Mittleidter Gardening Group. All over the world Mittleider was teaching people how to grow food more efficiently often in small spaces with poor soil conditions.

I will not claim that I have perfected the method, or that I am a “master gardener” and I will not say that this is the one and only best method that everyone should use, but it has been great for us in our garden.

On good years through end of July through October we get around 25 pounds of tomatoes from our garden per week . With cilantro, onions, jalapenos –We literally grow all the ingredients to set up a salsa-making factory. Our neighbors love us, because we give away so many tomatoes.  And vertical giant plants reaching eight feet tall, is impressive to wow neighbors and friends.

What I can say about this is that while you need to invest time and money into building T-Frames, the investment is well worth the cost. It’s around $50 per row, about $100 total for the 1×1 posts, wire rope, twine, screws and nails. If there is enough interest in this I’ll make a video on how to make the T-frames, but it is very simple with even a circular saw. I would reccomend buying 12″ nails to pound down from the top of the T-frame to secure the top to the base. I would also recommend setting the posts in concrete if your span is greater than 12′.

Readers: Please feel free to pose questions. This is the fifth video in our gardening series. Four years ago we posted a video called “How To Supersize your Tomatoes” which has received 225,000 views. I’m totally amazed by this, and I would love to engage the YouTube community and hear from you about your garden and promote, especially in Salt Lake City, backyard urban garden homesteading. It’s my dream to have a garden that produces the majority of food we eat in the summer. We are maybe a quarter of the way there now, I’d love to hear from you who are also on your way.

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