Upside-down Tomatoes

I like to call myself an amateur gardener. So when I heard about upside down growing tomatoes upside-down I had to give it a shot. The idea is that by inverting a tomato plant you can avoid a lot of hassle associated with growing them. Let gravity do your work for you. The plant can't fall over if its already hanging. It also cannot knock over its cage, which is really the primary pain in growing tomatoes.

My first challenge was figuring out how to hang my tomato plants. Tomatoes like sun, the more you can give to them the better so hanging the plants off the eves of my house was right out. I took a trip to OSH and found some steel sheepherder's hooks and hanging planters to go with them.

I next custo-modified the hanging planters for inverted planting by cutting slits in the bottom of them and shortening the chains so that there is now more room below the planters.


I positioned three of the sheepherder's hooks in a triangular formation in the middle of my yard and ran a drip irrigation line up the middle to water the plants. Then with the help of some garden twine I tied all three hooks together. Hopefully they will support each other once the tomatoes put on fruit and start weighing more. We shall see.