How to Dress Up a Dilapidated Fence and Feed a New Vertical Gardening Obsession All at the Same Time

A few weeks ago I posted about a class I took at Longwood Gardens on vertical gardening and how it fueled a new addiction. It made me buy this cool wine crate vertical garden panel from gsky. It has helped me further dress up this crappy old fence that is falling part.

I had already posted about the hanging terra cotta pots where I used plate hangers to hang them. I had originally thought I would make wood frames to hang around them, but didn’t really leave enough room up top to do that. Maybe next year. I think the vertical garden panel looks nice here and helps distract from the dilapidated old fence.

 
What’s cool about this system is that you keep the plants in their pots and just slip them into the panel, all easy peasy like. It is what I referred to as the “plant-in-pot” system in my other post. In the photo below I took out a couple of the pots so you can see. This system makes it easier to water and to change out any plants that might get too big or die.

This is a shady area, so I stuck with shade-loving plants. They are not all hardy, but I plan on bringing it into the greenhouse in the winter. The plants I used are four Maindenhair Ferns, one ivy (bottom middle), one Blue Star Fern (very middle), one Aurora Begonia (top middle), and two other kinds of Rex Begonias on the middle left and right, but the tags didn’t say the names. All of these are plants that look great on their own, but mixed together vertically they look even better. It will be interesting to see how they fair throughout the summer and fall.

Here is an update to the vertical panel of herbs that we planted in the class I took. I had kept it horizontal for a couple of weeks to help it root-in. Now it is hanging on the neighbor’s ugly, white, vinyl fence at the very back of my yard, in the Kitchen Garden. Again, a nice way to dress up a not so awesome fence. I didn’t want to drill any holes into a fence that doesn’t belong to me, so I used wire to hang it from the post.

And since we’re talking about the fence, I also hung my succulent wreath on it that I had made in a class at Meadowbrook Farms in April (I had posted about that, too). I let this root-in horizontally for about a month and a half. I also used wire to hang this from the post.

So there you have it, fun with hanging/vertical garden stuff. Now where else can I add some vertical interest? Hmmmm....