Has chronic pain caused you to abandon your gardening dreams?  The Garden Tower is a great way to reconnect to your gardening passion without digging.

Although the Garden Tower was on my gift wish list a few years back, I was surprised and delighted to receive it.  In the beginning, it was slow going, but now I am reaping the benefits of year-round gardening in this beautiful, protected system.

If you’re not familiar with the garden tower concept, it’s sort of like the old strawberry planters with tiers of pockets for plants taken to the next level. 

According to their website, the garden tower is a vertical container gardening ecosystem.  It’s a rotating composter that grows 50 plants in 4 square feet nearly anywhere.

My Garden Tower came with wheels that allow me to pull it around.

The first year of attempting to grow vegetables in the Garden Tower, I was a little disappointed with the results.  But that was due to my lack of knowledge and experience as I’ve soon found out.  I’m so glad I didn’t give up on it after the first season. 

One of the mistakes I made, in the beginning, was in the soil I used to initially fill the tower up.  I bought the cheapest ‘garden soil’ at my home improvement store thinking that I just needed something to fill all the pockets in.  This soil is worthless.  It’s not only devoid of any nutrients to boost plant growth but is a horrible texture and growing medium.  My desire to save money cost me a whole season of growth.

But maybe that’s ok.  I did get a ‘base’ of soil in the container.  Later I learned to supplement with my own compost and water with an addition of humic acid to continuously build the soil.

Through trial and error, I’ve learned what types of plants I want to grow in the container.  My favorites are my salad vegetables.   

I eat a huge salad every day for lunch.   This is where I get a lot of my homegrown nutrients and fiber. Because of the Garden Tower, I now have my daily, nutrient-packed salad down to a science. 

I am not good at growing lettuce.  I don’t know if this is an experience thing or a Texas thing.  But when I sow lettuce in the ground, I wind up with spindly plants that the bugs use for their all-you-can-eat buffet.

So, I start with a base of store-bought lettuce.  I usually use a bag of Butter Bliss, but a couple of other products work well also.  Walmart carries a four-pack of Artisan lettuce that are four tiny heads of beautiful lettuces.  But these need to be washed and processed.  I usually opt for the ease of the bagged lettuce that’s already washed unless it doesn’t look fresh.  Target carries a brand I like too called Organic Girl Butter Plus.   I love the organic factor but honestly, because I’m using so much of my own, fresh, organic produce to supplement the salad, I place more emphasis on ease of use than organic.  If it’s bagged, triple-washed and easy so that I can just dump it into the big Tupperware bowl, I’m happy.

Then I add the magic supplied by my Garden Tower.

Every week I harvest organically grown, nutrient-dense additions to my salad.  Swiss chard, spinach, 3 varieties of kale, bunching onions, leaf lettuce, mustard, radicchio, nasturtium and a variety of herbs all grow happily in the Garden Tower.

After two years of building up the soil in my tower with compost, worms and KNF inputs, I finally have a process that is working wonderfully for me. 

I continually experiment with which plants I want to use.  This year I’m trying out tatsoi, cutting celery (Apium) and an adorable miniature snow pea “Tom thumb” from Baker’s Heirloom Seeds.

My Garden Tower came with wheels that allow me to pull it around.  The wheels allow me to pull it in and out of the garage all winter as needed.  It also lets me pull it out of the harsh sun in the summer when temps are too high for these cool loving plants. 

I have been astonished this year at the harvests I’ve been able to get every week from the Garden Tower.  It’s brought my daily lunch salad to new nutritious levels that I wouldn’t have thought possible from direct sowing in the ground.  And it is available to me year-round. 

I don’t try to grow large crops in the Garden Tower such as potatoes, tomatoes, onions and even most root crops like radishes.  I feel like the space is too precious for that when I can get more out of each pocket with a cut-and-come-again kind of plant.  I’m not saying you couldn’t successfully grow these plants in it, I think anything is possible with it if you experiment and figure out what works best for your gardening style and climate. 

The Garden Tower has taken my food production to the next level.  Growing nutritious, power-packed superfoods, right off my patio is fun and satisfying. 

I’ve also noticed that the swiss chard that I over-wintered in my vegetable garden is much tougher than the chard coming out of my Garden Tower.  I tend to use the tougher, garden chard in cooking and use the Garden Tower chard raw.  However, my Garden Tower chard has produced so much this year that, in addition to daily salads, I use it at least once a month in cooking.  A favorite recipe is Roasted Swiss Chard with Feta. 

Or I just throw it in a garden vegetable frittata.

The investment of the Garden Tower has reaped great dividends and I will continue to explore new plants that work best for my cooking and gardening needs.  It has become an indispensable part of my year-round food production garden and you should consider making it a part of your Back2Gardening mission!