Multi-storey cone kitchen garden designs

 How to build  a simple garden in your backyard

In most parts of the world, land is increasingly becoming rare every day and there is an increasing desire by individuals and families to grow part of the food they eat every day. This has led to the innovation of various types of backyard gardening systems, one of them being the multi-storey cone kitchen garden designs. Vertical kitchen gardens are becoming popular every day because of their potential to capitalize on the vertical space to create more area to grow more crops in the backyard of your home compound.

The multi-storey kitchen garden could be designed in a number of ways that allow the exploitation of the vertical space, and the cone garden design is the most recent one to be highly adopted by families and individuals who wish to grow part of their vegetables within the home compound. This design is capable of increasing the land area by around 7 times depending on the height of the cone as well as the number of terraces designed. The innovativeness of the kitchen gardens has qualified them as part of the 21st-century climate-smart agriculture technologies that are suitable for self-consumption agriculture all over the world.

Read also: Crops that do well in a kitchen garden

 Cone kitchen gardens offer creative solutions to many problems associated with small scale vegetable farming by offering innovative ways on how to adapt farming anywhere from the city suburbs to rural areas. They also offer a variety of solutions to space and productivity at a low cost of production. Vertical kitchen gardens also allow for mixed vegetable farming which is beneficial in dietary infusion such as kales, strawberry, spinach among others, and also comes with an added advantage of aesthetic because of the good-looking green landscapes. Please read to the end so that you can learn more on how you can maximize your limited space to practice highly productive agriculture.

How to construct a multi-storely Kitchen garden

1.    Site identification

If you live in an urban area, you can choose your backyard or your kitchen garden as the site where the structure will be constructed.

2.    Soil collection

You do not have to use the soil that is naturally available in the site that you have identified. You can collect soil from a different site and import it to your site. The soil quality is that it must be well-drained soil that is verified to be free from pests and diseases. The best quality soil should not be collected from a busy farm because there is a high risk of contamination. Soil collected from a construction site for example roadside or near a housing project where soil has been excavated. Try and get the red soil and some dry and well-composed manure.

3.    Construction

The whole idea behind the vertical kitchen garden is to maximize the use of the vertical space. You can make a simple structure yourself if you dare to try. If not, you can contact some local professionals to whom you can give the design that you want and they will build it for you. I would recommend that you don’t buy the very expensive and luxurious looking designs if your primary goal is just to produce food, but if you want to double food production with aesthetic, then you can invest in the professional beautiful designs that will add a taste of landscaping within your compound.

4.    Planting

Depending on the crops that you are growing, you can plant the seeds directly or go through a nursery. If you are planting strawberries, you use runners as planting materials. Make sure you get proper advice from an expert if you do not have proper knowledge on what to plant and how to plant it.

Depending on much you wish to invest, you can have a drip irrigation system installed or you can choose to irrigate manually.

Advantages of multi-storely gardens

1.    Maximize on space

A multi-storey garden with six layers of terraces allows you to multiply the space available by six. Depending on the number of layers you chose, you will end up with more space than the conventional flat gardens.

2.    Water conservation

If you grow vegetables in a cone kitchen garden, the leafy vegetables form a canopy that covers the soil in the terraces which in turn reduces the soil heating through direct sunlight leading to low evaporation. Actually, when vegetables are at their maturity level, you may only need to water them once a week because there is minimal water loss through evaporation.

3.    Non-chemical weed control

As mentioned above, when the leaves form a canopy and cover the soil in the terraces, weeds are unable to grow because they are suppressed due to lack of sunlight.

In Kenya for instance, the multi-storely cone kitchen garden is taking the urban community by storm. Families that are driven by the desire to grow their own vegetables have taken up kitchen garden farms in a way.

 Read also: How to make a kitchen garden in Kenya: Cone kitchen garden