Project 8: Growing in Tiers

Why would you want to do this? You like growing, but you have limited space and want to make the most of it without taking away square footage.

Why wouldn’t you want to do this? You are content with your garden space and feel that you have room to grow everything you’d like.

Skills needed: Basic gardening skills plus some creativity in planning out what to plant in each tier for aesthetic appeal.

Further refinements: Last summer, while preparing to go away for a week’s vacation, I needed to quickly maximize my pre-existing automatic watering setup on the patio. I grabbed some of my small pots and stuck them into bigger pots with drippers in them. I extended the watering time so that the small pots would get more water, which would then flow directly from their drainage holes into the larger pots. Using the pots in tiers was a quick solution.

I also recently saw a wide staircase made from landscape timbers. It was maybe 15 to 20 feet across, and at least eight steps high, and someone had used the structure for tiered planting. The gardener had planted taller grasses and small shrubs in a pattern, similar to how one would lay bricks so that no mortared seam was directly above a lower one. It forced the person climbing up the stairs to walk in a zigzag so as not to step on any of the plants. It was an interesting and beautiful use of a necessary but repetitive landscape element.

If you have the space for a small raised bed or some large planters, you can grow different types of plants, including taller plants with deep roots, without giving up any extra floor space.

Where hanging is not a good option, stacking up from a solid base is an alternative. It is possible to build a vertical planter by piling progressively smaller planters on top of each other. With bottomless containers, you can create a tall, deep space for a larger plant or tree, retaining the lower, shallower areas for the smaller and less aggressive plants that might otherwise get overrun.

Consider what you like to eat that you could grow in small planters, and how little floor space a stack of those planters could fit in. Planting in tiers is little more than combining vertical gardening (Project 6 in this section) with a raised bed (Project 7 in this section) with one key difference: instead of hanging the planters and medium in their own individual containers, you’re stacking planters of successively smaller diameter with the largest, heaviest one serving as a foundation. This is a boon for growing because you gain root depth in the higher beds or planters with the stability of a wide, strong base.

When you plant tiered beds/planters, you have different options and dimensions than you would with a single-depth planter. You can put shallower-rooting plants in the lowest level and larger/deeper-rooting plants in the middle and upper tiers. Another option is to put trailers and creepers (such as strawberries) in the lowest tier and more upright or taller plants in the middle and uppermost tiers so that they don’t shade the lower ones. Yet another plan is to put taller plants in the lowest level specifically to contribute shade to the upper levels, and then grow shade-tolerant plants, such as spinach and lettuce, in the upper tiers.

Tiers with Raised Beds

Materials:

•2x6 or 2x8 lumber of desired lengths, allowing for overlap on ends

•Electric drill

•Drill bit

•Phillips head deck screws

•Phillips head screwdriver bit

•Plastic for lining bed, if desired (you can use salvaged plastic bags or sheets)

•Cardboard, newspaper, or landscape cloth large enough to cover the bottom of the bed

•Soil

Step 1: Follow the steps in the Raised Beds project to build a raised bed of the desired size and dimensions to serve as the base. Fill it with soil.

Step 2: Decide how much space in the middle or back of the bed you’d like the next tier to occupy. Build another bed, as before, with these reduced dimensions.

Step 3: Tamp down the soil in the first bed, at least where the next tier will sit, so that the upper beds have a solid foundation that won’t shift much as the soil settles.

Step 4: Place the second tier on top of the first and fill it with soil.

Step 5: If you’d like a third and fourth tier, repeat Steps 2–4 with smaller dimensions as desired. Four is the maximum number of tiers recommended for this project.

Step 6: Plant the levels as desired.

A tiered kitchen garden supplies herbs and leafy greens.

Tiers with Planters

Materials:

•Three or four pots, either with drainage holes or with the bottoms cut off, each a few inches smaller in diameter than the previous one

Step 1: Fill the largest pot with soil.

Step 2: Set the next largest pot on top of the soil in the largest pot, and fill the second pot with soil.

Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 and 2 for the third (and fourth, if applicable) pot.

Step 4: Plant the levels as desired.

A whimsical take on using planters in tiers.