Grow Squash Vertically - Even Zucchini // Complete Guide

Cucurbits. A really weird word that you may not have heard of before, but it's a family of plants that actually includes a lot of our favorite garden vegetables. Cucumbers, gourds, melons, pumpkins, and squash. Now all those plants tend to take up a lot of precious garden real estate, but I'm going to show you how to actually expand the amount of growing space you have by five or ten times, and you don't even have to move. What's going on guys? Welcome to another video. I'm Brian. If you are looking to learn how to grow your own organic fruits and vegetables easily and inexpensively, then get started now by clicking the subscribe button and hit the bell icon for all notifications of my future videos. Let's get started. I already have quite a few members of the cucurbit family growing and actually starting to set fruit. I've got some cucumbers, some summer squash, and even some loofah. Today we're going to be planting some more squash and maybe even a watermelon. But traditionally grown, the cucurbit family takes up a ton of space. For instance, these are the cucumbers I already have planted, and if you take a look at these, I have five cucumbers planted right here. Two or three plants would take up this entire raised bed if I were to grow them traditional way along the ground. A lot of times when you're talking about how much space you have to grow in, you're talking in two dimensions. Length times width. So for instance, this bed right here is four feet wide and ten feet long. That's 40 square feet. Not a huge amount, but what if we could take that 40 square feet and transform it into 320 cubic feet of growing space? We can do that by going vertical. Now we're talking four feet wide by 10 feet long by eight feet high. You can see with the cucumbers, I have them growing up bamboo canes made into a teepee. You can use a wooden trellis, a cattle panel, or you can use strings like I'm using for my tomatoes. Anything that gets the plants up and off the ground and into the air, leaving more ground space for planting instead of just leaves. Today we're going to be planting a summer squash and a winter squash. Now they're both planted at the exact same time. They're grown throughout the summer. A summer squash has a thin edible skin and once you pick it, you have a very limited time to be able to use it. A winter squash, on the other hand, has a thick skin or a rind and it can be stored for eating in the winter time. The growing needs for both are the same. They both like a moisture retentive, warm, fertile soil. In fact, they would be very happy growing in the middle of your compost bin. So we want to make sure we add a really organic compost to the ground where we're going to be planting them. You can't add too much and if you have some organic manure on hand composted, all the better. Now there's an old adage that I grew up with, my grandparents used it, that all the cucurbit family should be planted in hills. Now that's not true for most gardens. Hills will help if you have really bad drainage. So you want to kind of increase the drainage by lifting them higher off the ground. Hills will work for that. Hills also used to be used and maybe still are. Planting in hills of, you know, kind of half composted manure to in cold climates to get the plant started early, it kind of would add some more heat to the area. But for the average garden, you don't need to do that and that alone right there saves on space. So I've got my site chosen. I've already amended the soil with homemade compost including organic chicken manure and so I'm ready to plant my seeds. The seeds that I'm planting are casserta. It's kind of a zucchini type of squash. I'm going to plant two seeds in each spot just so I have insurance if one doesn't germinate and then I can worry about thinning later. For the average family, one to two plants is going to keep you well stocked. These guys produce like crazy so don't plant too much or like my mom says, you're going to have zucchini coming out your ears. So once the plants have a few sets of leaves, we're going to now make a play to take advantage of all of this extra empty vertical garden space. These yellow straight neck summer squash are a little past that. I waited a little bit long because I wanted to include it in this video but we're going to take a wooden stake or a thick bamboo cane and put it into the ground about two inches from the base of the plant. Now typically in the normal way you grow any type of summer squash or zucchini, the plant throughout the season kind of develops this long trunk that kind of snakes along the bed and you know if you clip the leaves off like you should to get rid of any yellow ones or mildewy ones, you're going to end up with this long snake of a trunk with the bush kind of somewhere down here at the end with the fruit on it. But you've wasted all of that garden space and so what we're going to do is we're going to train the plant right up this stake. So as it grows, it's going to grow up up up. We're going to tie it every few inches or so and again we're going to take off those bottom leaves but it's going to get the leaves off the ground the fruit off the ground to get them away from some of the pests and what we're going to end up with is kind of a little squash tree with a trunk and then a canopy up here. It makes it really easy also to for the pollinators to see the flowers and for us to see the fruits. Now I'm going to be planting some winter squash in this case spaghetti squash. Granted it's not like spaghetti at all but if you have a good sauce and you're watching your carbs it'll do. Now unlike zucchini type squashes winter squash grows more like a vine like pumpkins and so it's even more important to take advantage of vertical space because one plant can literally fill one of these 4x10 beds. So in this case we're going to be growing them up a cattle panel trellis that I have folded in half and I've secured with two t-posts and it's really sturdy. I want to end up with two or three vines so I'm going to plant two seeds in three spots along one side of the trellis about 18 inches apart. Again I've amended the soil with a lot of good organic material. Now on the other side I'm going to plant some watermelon. Now these are a miniature type of watermelon. The plant only grows three feet long and the fruit only weigh about eight to ten pounds. Now I'm not sure whether or not I will have to support the fruit hanging under here. We'll have to wait a little bit later in the season and see how strong the vines are first but I'll keep you updated on that. Again a couple seeds in three different spots about a foot and a half apart. Once the plants are up and have a few leaves I'm going to start fertilizing with an organic fish and seaweed fertilizer. I actually use that on all my plants in the garden every two to three weeks. This is the brand I use. I'll put a link down below if you want to take a try at that one. That leaves me with some open space down here below so I'm probably going to plant some kind of lettuce or heat tolerant summer green because they will appreciate the shade that these vines will provide. That's all for this video. If you have any questions or any tips you'd like to share please leave them in the comments below. 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