A Mobile Way To Grow Vines

The best part of this system is that it's mobile. It consists of cattle paneling inside a plastic pot with dirt and another pot in the middle. Here's a picture.



Here's how you can do it.

Cut a piece of cattle paneling that will, when curled, fit inside a 2 - 3 gallon pot, leaving an opening large enough for you to comfortably stick your hand through. Curl the paneling so you can put it in the pot, but remember to keep one side open. Put the paneling in the pot and add enough dirt so that when you put a 1-gallon pot in it, the rims of both pots will be the same height.



Put the smaller pot in the middle of the big pot and fill it up with soil, trowel more dirt on top of the 1-gallon pot into a mound, and then from the top of the paneling shake it back and forth so the soil falls down the sides. Keep doing this until the big pot is filled. Then take your fingers and push the soil down in the large pot all the way around the 1-gallon pot. Add more dirt to the 1-gallon pot, shake, and tamp down. Keep doing this until there is about an inch of firmly packed soil below the rim of the one-gallon pot.



Carefully remove the center pot from the big pot. If you tamp down hard enough, it should leave a template. Take your plant that's in a 1-gallon pot and lower it carefully into the template. Then gently take the vines and carefully weave them around the paneling.



For the morning glories, I dug holes in the yard half as deep as the large pots and then placed the pots in the holes. This makes it easy to weed-whack around them. I now use these holes for my tropical hibiscuses after discovering masonry ladders for my vines.



When winter approached, I'd clean off the dead vines and store the pots outside. In spring I'd already have my next set of plants in 1-gallon pots ready to go. I'd just remove the center pots and plop in that year's plants.

With plants that need to be overwintered in the greenhouse, I can pick up the whole thing and put it in the greenhouse or just remove the one-gallon pot with the plant and put it in the greenhouse. If you do this, you will want to put another pot in its place so that the sides won't collapse.

I've also used this system for growing tomatoes. It works wonderfully! Another plus is that the center pot doesn't seem to dry out as quickly because it's "insulated."