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Hanging baskets always fascinated me. It's one of my favorites in the garden. Something suspended in mid-air with flowers and greenery cascading over the sides just has its own magic.
Hanging plant baskets are certainly not confined to flowering or ornamental plants. Imagine my surprise when I heard about upside down tomatoes.
Imagine a tomato plant growing out of the bottom of a hanging basket.
A while back I heard a story that someone made a hole in the bottom of a hanging planter. Then he took a tomato seedling that was big enough to to transplant and stuck it through the hole upside down. I just couldn't resist trying it.
The one in the coffee tin did not do too well. The tin were too small. The tomato plant needs a bit more soil. The tin were a bit small. Regrettably I didn't take care of that one enough. A tomato plant growing like that grows to fill harvest though.
A full size tomato plant ready to start harvest hanging over your vegetable garden will be quite an interesting feature to show visitors.
Hanging baskets with plants are always interesting but they come with their own problems. A hanging basket with plants at eye level hight or lower somehow loses some of its glamor. For some reason it looks better when it makes you look up. The longer the trail of plants hanging down the better.
When it's high up, problems with maintenance and watering arises.
Watering can be done by an irrigation with thin pipes. You have to hide the pipes so it looks inconspicuous though.
A pully system can come in handy to lower or raise the basket. For smaller baskets a running the rope it hangs on through a ring may also work well. You can lower the basket then do maintenance and watering and raise it to where you want it again.
With hanging baskets you may also have the problem that it dries out in-between drying times. This problem you can solve easily.
You have two easy options. The first is to put a saucer in the bottom of the basket before adding your growing medium. The saucer creates a small reservoir when you water the basket, maintaining the moisture level of the basket for longer.
Another solution is to use florest gell as part of the growing medium. The gell comes in powdered form os as small balls. It soaks up water and expands retaining the water. The plants then pulls tge water from the gell when needed.
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I hope inspired you to hang a few baskets in your garden.
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Live life to the fullest.