How-To: Create a Vertical Kitchen Garden

Are you excited for spring planting? We certainly are! To celebrate spring and summer gardening we’re featuring a week’s worth of posts and giveaways. To start, we’re looking at one of our favorite Pottery Barn products, thePottery Barn Linear Succulent Planters. Whether you have a huge backyard to plant with florals and vegetables or a small stoop, vertical planters can be a great element to any outdoor space. Recently, one of our Pottery Barn team members decided to add some spring-related garden decor to her front entrance with a little help from the Pottery Barn Linear Succulent Planters. The linear planters, which are crafted from galvanized iron and finished in matte pewter, struck her as a perfect way to frame her front door entrance.

Our Pottery Barn team member told us that she challenged herself to create the linear planter display using only edible plants. “That way,” she told us, “my front entrance wasn’t only pretty, it was also, essentially, a kitchen garden I could utilize while I was cooking.”

We asked our Pottery Barn team member for tips on re-creating this look at home. Here’s what she told us:

• “Use plants that you love. We love to cook, so I included things that we’d use in our kitchen, such as herbs, greens and edible flowers. Look for varieties of chard or lettuce whose leaves can be snipped off individually and then will re-grow in the container.”
• “For drainage purposes, I added a handful of pebbles before planting my linear planter.”
• “Use a high-quality container-specific soil for your planter and make sure to amend the soil with an organic supplement to keep your plants growing strong.”
• “I planted my plants in the same pattern in each planter, so it had a unified look when placed on either side of the door.”
• “Make sure you place your planter somewhere where it will get the right amount of sun. It’s easy to determine which plants need full or partial sunlight — just look at the tag in each planter when you go to your local nursery.”

Have you tried using a linear planter around your home? We’d love to hear how you like it!