As space around here gets tighter, plants have to start going vertical. Everyone has seen those Topsy Turvy tomato planters by now and quite a few people have already made DIY tutorials.
Unfortunately I don’t drink sodas so I don’t have any big bottles around, and the few cans in my house are too small to hold a plant for long, so I decided to recycle some plastic nursery pots. With a pair of scissors, an awl, 2 3″ circles of fabric weed block, and some garden wire, I turned two pots into upside-down/right-side-up tomato planters.
– I cut ahole in the bottom of each pot about 1/2″ in diameter.
– In the center of the 2 weedblock circles, I cut a 1″ X, so that I’d be able to pull the plant through.
– Using the awl, I poked 4 equally spaced holes around the rim of the pot, about 1/2″ down from the lip.
– With the garden wire I made two hanging loops through the holes, about 6″ long when hung, so roughly 24″ of wire was used per pot. *It’s important to make the pot hangable before putting the plants in, it is difficult to pot the plants without damaging them otherwise*
– Gently handling my seedlings, I poked them, root end first (typically you go the other way but my plants were too big to pull them through leaf side without damaging them), through the hole in the bottom of the pot and the X of the weedblock circle.
– Making sure about 2″ of the plant were in the pot I covered the roots with dirt
– Now you hang your pot from a spot that is at a convenient working height.
– For the right-side-up tomatoes, I planted them on top of the roots of the upside-down tomatoes, filling in around them as you would in a normal planter
– Water in thoroughly. I keep other potted plants beneath these so that the water that drips through helps out those potted plants.
Yay for dirty hands!
Grasshopper Sense 