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Product Description
Amazon.com Product Description
It doesn’t get much easier or more exciting to grow strawberries or fresh herbs than with the Felknor Ventures Topsy Turvy Planter. Just place your strawberry or herb plant in the Topsy Turvy, add your favorite potting soil, hang it, and add water. The upside-down planter uses gravity to force the water and nutrients down freely from the root to the fruit. Or grow fresh herbs like parsley, basil, oregano, rosemary, mint, and more. The planter acts as a greenhouse, using the sun to warm the plant, so the roots explode and thrive. Hanging the Topsy Turvy keeps it away from ground fungus, cutworms, and harmful bacteria. No pesticides, digging, weeding, or other dirty, backbreaking work is necessary to grow the yummiest strawberries and herbs in the neighborhood. Create fresh seasonings and fun new recipes using your own ingredients. You can even grow them organically. Setup and maintenance are easy.
The Topsy Turvy Strawberry Planter is the most brilliant new invention ever for growing fresh strawberries. Because the ingenious Topsy Turvy is upside down, gravity naturally causes the water and nutrients to pour directly and freely down from the root to the fruit and each port hold 2 plants for even bigger yield! Simply place any strawberry or herb plant in the Topsy Turvy, add favorite potting soil, hang it up and then water. Sun warms the plant like a greenhouse, the root system explodes and thrives inside the planter. Plus, hanging in the air eliminates any ground fungus, harmful bacteria, cutworm damage - no need for pesticides, digging, weeding and makes berry picking easy. Can also grow herbs like parsley, oregano, basil, rosemary, mint and more.
Product Details
- Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 9.5 x 23 inches ; 1 pounds
- Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
- Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
- ASIN: B001WAL3XA
- Item model number: TT041112
Product Features
- Grow delicious, juicy strawberries all season long in just 3 simple steps
- Upside-down planter forces water and nutrients to flow directly down from root to fruit
- No pesticides, digging, weekend, or backbreaking work required
- Grow parsley, basil, oregano, rosemary, mint, and other tasty herbs too
- Simple to set up and maintain
Felknor Ventures TT041112 Topsy Turvy Strawberry Planter
Customer Reviews
First, what's in the box. You get the planter itself (which includes a three-wire hanging system with a swiveling hook attachment at the junction), a plastic cap that covers the top of the planter, a small sheet of instructions, and a reasonably heavy duty screw-in hook that you're to screw into the awning of your house. And....that's it. To this, you need to add potting soil, fertilizer and plants.
The advertising and general presentation of this item makes it seem so simple: Fill it with potting soil, add plants, hang, water, wait for berries to appear and enjoy. Like countless others I fell for that. I bought this item as a treat for my three year old daughter, so she could gain the experience of watching plants grow and strawberries appear.
I followed the instructions verbatim, using Miracle Grow potting soil and plant food, measured to the correct proportions. I bought 30 strawberry plants from a local greenhouse. I inserted two plants per hole, filling it up with soil as I went. When it was complete I covered it and hung it from the included hook just outside my back door. I watered it every day, just as the instructions said.
And then I ran into problems.
The first thing I noticed is that the lower plants started to wilt. My mother, who knows far more about gardening than I do, decreed that there wasn't enough water getting down to them. I recalled that when I added water to the planter it tended to overfill very quickly. So I took the planter down and very carefully hollowed out a space in the middle of the planter going all the way down. I inserted a cardboard paper tower tube (into which I had poked a number of holes), hung it back up, and then watered it. This time the water went all the way to the bottom, going through the holes in the tube (and the tube itself) to water all the plants. Problem solved, or so I thought.
Over the next few weeks I watched all of the bottom row plants and most of the middle row plants wither and die. The topmost plants flourished. To date, I don't understand why. My only guess - and this is PURELY a guess - is that I was a little too rough on the root systems for the lower plants (which were inserted first) and, as I got used to the process, got progressively more gentle, which saved the upper plants.
I watched the remaining plants grow and flower and small berries began to appear. Success! Then I discovered/realized the second problem that the instructions don't warn you about. Although strawberries are very tasty to us humans, there are a LARGE number of wild creatures who will happily gorge themselves on them as well. For weeks I watched numerous small berries appear, and then just begin to ripen, and then the next day saw huge chunks - or entire berries - disappear from the plant.
That's when I had enough. I had the planter for two months and hadn't gotten a single berry from it. I moved the planter into my house, hung it on a hook in our sun room, and every few days checked for new flowers. I pollinated using a small watercolor brush from my daughter's paint set. Eventually new berries began to appear and ripen and we were able to enjoy them. They are, in fact, quite tasty.
So there you have it. This is NOT a "set it and forget it" deal. It requires some time and effort in order to achieve results. For today's fast food-oriented society this could be a deal breaker, but I leave it up to you to decide.
Two other things..... First, after about a month I discovered, by lifting the plastic top off the planter, that new plants had started growing inside the planter (rather than through the holes in the side). I was able to redirect these new plants through the side openings but be aware that this may happen. Second - and this IS mentioned in the manual, but IMO not strenuously enough - the filled and watered planter is HEAVY, easily 20 lbs, so it's wise to make sure you screw the hook into a place that can support that kind of weight.
One nice touch: The hook assembly has a swivel in it which makes it very easy to rotate the planter on the hook, so as to best take advantage of available light. It's a good idea to rotate the planter every day or two so as to allow all plants an equal opportunity to get some light.
I would have very much liked to have gotten a little more information in the instruction manual. For those who have a "green thumb" what I describe above is probably obvious, and in retrospect it's obvious to me too - NOW. A couple of months ago, not so much. Given that this is targeted towards people without a lot of gardening experience some additional information, tips, instructions, etc would have been very helpful. For lacking that information I take away one star.
Where do I start... For starters it is very difficult to place plants inside the little holes without breaking stems and leaves due to very sharp edges on the openings. Strawberries need to be planted in loose acidic soil, however, after watering, gravity compacts the plants down to the point that the top two rows (10 plants) pull themselves into the planter and hide the crown. This inhibits any new growth since the crown is no longer exposed. Since the holes are sharp and are in a closed position, you need to be vigilant checking for new growth and sometimes have to pull it out from the holes. I had numerous incidences of new leaves growing up into the planter that had to be pulled back out.
Since the planter compacts the soil, drainage becomes VERY POOR, leading to improper use of iron for strawberry plants and chlorosis, nothing that an iron supplement can't fix. The instructions say to water almost every day, I have not watered mine in 4 days and the soil is still moist, 6 of the 15 plants have now rotted off, even though I never watered daily. Even in the 90 degree heat that we have been having I still have moist soil with very infrequent waterings. I don't know how they can claim you can't overwater, but clearly these plants are overwatered.
The only strawberry plants that are doing well are two new ones that I had runners go into new REGULAR pots, those plants look fabulous. All of the strawberries that I have obtained from this plant (and there have not been many) are about the size of a pea, and I used the really good Quinault variety that is supposed to be disease resistant too and 2" diameter fruits.
I have been container gardening for years, my tomatoes, peppers, basil, green onion and parsley look fantastic (all in normal pots), my topsy turvy looks like it needs to be taken out back and shot.
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