- in Gardening by Alexis Rodrigo
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What Can You Grow in the Tower Garden? Literally Anything!
What can you grow in the Tower Garden?
According to the Tower Garden website, you can grow anything “except root crops, grapevines, bushes and trees.”
So why does the title of this post say you can literally grow anything?
I’ll answer that in a moment.
In the meantime, let me show you the three main types of plants you can grow in the Tower Garden.
Fruits and Vegetables
As a rule of thumb, you can grow any fruit or vegetable that grows above ground.
Green, leafy vegetables do especially well in an aeroponic system like the Tower Garden. These include arugula, bok choy, chard, collards, cress, lettuce, kale, mustard greens, spinach, and sorrel.
This purple bok choy grew beautifully in the Tower Garden.
Surprisingly, you can also grow plants that vine, spread out, and need staking, such as: tomatoes, beans, eggplants, peppers, peas, squash, and zucchini.
That said, you will need to get the Tower Garden Support Cage for vining plants. It’s sold on the Tower Garden website as an accessory for the Tower Garden Flex. Even though it purportedly only fits the Flex, that has not stopped Tower Garden Home owners from using it as well.
Some simply bent the lower part of the cage to fit around the base of the Home, like this:
Some Tower Garden Home owners simply bend the legs of the Support Cage to make it fit their towers.
A simpler option is to simply set the cage on the floor around the Home and not even attach it to the Tower.
Squashes tend to spread out, so if you want to plant those, you’ll have to make space for them around the Tower. This is particularly important if your Tower is indoors. It’s a good idea to look for bush-type or dwarf varieties of vegetables, if you don’t want them to take over your house.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, if you’re growing something tall like okra, you may have to keep the other ports empty. Otherwise, the tall plants will block the light for the smaller plants, and they may not thrive.
This is what that would look like:
Herbs
Herbs are perfect in the Tower Garden! If you love to cook, you’ll get spoiled when you experience being mere steps away from the freshest herbs for your recipes.
Popular herbs grown in the Tower Garden include basil, chives, cilantro, mint, oregano, sage, and thyme.
But did you know that you can also grow lavender...
… lemongrass ...
… and stevia?
And now, we come to the most fun category of things you can plant in your Tower Garden …
Flowers
Who ever said the Tower Garden was only for planting food? As a matter of fact, you can also plant a wide variety of flowers.
You read that right: You can plant flowers — both edible and ornamental — in your Tower Garden.
Popular ones I’ve seen in various forums are calendula, marigolds, and nasturtiums. You can even plant dwarf sunflowers!
As for ornamental plants, I was surprised to learn that you can plant flowers like cosmos and hibiscus, which I know tend to grow tall.
Aside from being beautiful and sometimes edible, some flowers serve other purposes.
Outdoors, they attract pollinators so your fruiting plants will produce more.
And whether outdoors and indoors, some flowers deter bugs! Petunias, for example, repel asparagus beetles, leafhoppers, aphids, and tomato worms.
According to the Tower Garden blog, every Tower Garden owner should plant the following multi-use flowers:
I haven’t planted any flowers on my Tower yet, but I definitely plan to do so soon!
Growing Root Crops and Everything Else in the Tower Garden
After meeting dozens of Tower Gardeners in online forums, I’ve come to the conclusion that they don’t take no for an answer, lol!
Even when the website says “We do not recommend growing fruiting or flowering plants (ex. tomatoes) with grow lights,” indoor Tower Gardeners still go on to do so.
Let me show you what I mean:
That's just one example; I've seen more!
It’s gotten to the point where Tim Blank himself, the creator of the Tower Garden, has been growing root crops like radishes and carrots in his Tower:
I myself was successful at growing sweet potatoes in my Tower Garden, with delicious results.
So I figured, there’s always a way to grow anything in the Tower Garden. It just may not be exactly the same as growing them in soil.
Here are a few ideas:
1. Keep them small.
As Tim described in the video, you can grow certain plants and then harvest them before they get too big for the Tower Garden. Or you can harvest by trimming them back frequently, thus keeping them from getting too tall.
2. Grow it as a micro- or baby green.
Grow root crops or tubers like beets but harvest their leafy green tops before their tubers form. This is what I plan to do with the sweet potatoes I planted.
3. Start them in the Tower Garden then transplant.
Seeds and seedlings tend to do really well in the Tower Garden. So much so that a friend of mine decided she would use hers as a kind of halfway house for outdoor plants. She would start them in her Tower then move them to her outdoor garden or a larger container.
(Note: I have not tried this with tree saplings or shrub seedlings, so I cannot vouch for this method. If you do try it, let me know how it goes!)
See? I told you you could plant anything in the Tower Garden!
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