ZipGrow™ Tower Spacing

Proper ZipGrow™ Tower spacing

ZipGrow™ Towers are being used all over the world to grow more delicious food in all kinds of spaces.

Just how many towers can you fit into your space? This post was written to help you estimate how much food you can grow in your space with ZipGrow™ Towers.

What’s the proper spacing for my ZipGrow towers?

Spacing ZipGrow™ towers is a very simple process, but must be fine-tuned to your individual needs.

As with all tower systems, spacing is important as it influences the amount of light available at the bottom of the tower.

Most tower systems experience a lot of light loss, even at generous spacings. This is especially true of 4 sided systems, which experience almost 90% light loss from the top front of the tower to the bottom rear of the tower, even when spaced at 10 square feet per tower!

ZipGrow™ Towers are designed to conserve light

With ZipGrow™ towers, even when the plants are fully grown with one tower every 2.5 square feet, the average light loss from the top front of the tower to the bottom rear of the tower is only 32 or 33 percent.

This means that ZipGrow towers are three times more efficient at light conservation than 4 sided towers, even when spaced 4 times as densely.

Spacing ZipGrow™ Towers for maximized growing

Mass configurations are usually the best option for commercial producers cranking out high yields. What this typically looks like is 20 or 25 ZipGrow™ Towers hanging in rows on a rack. There can be multiple racks in a greenhouse (or warehouse).

When ZipGrow™ towers are massed and managed properly, 2.5 square feet per tower is more than enough to get good crops out of your towers with natural light.

The spacing that you choose (side to side and back to back) is relatively variable, but I would recommend choosing enough space that you can access the towers to move them around, check for bugs and spray.

In our greenhouse, we usually have around 20 inches of space between rows to do this.

Farm Wall™ Spacing

Now if you’re growing on a wall or in a center-facing row with towers,  you can space them much more closely. When we put towers on a wall or grow them on racks (center-facing rows) we can often space them very closely.

For very bushy crops, I would recommend 12 inch centers, with 8 inches between towers.
For more average crops like lettuce you might space the towers on 8 inch centers (with 4 inches between towers), and for very short-statured crops that like to be planted densely you can place towers side by side, or space them with only an inch or two between the towers.

Depending on the crop and spacing that you choose with this technique, you can end up with a very bushy, dense wall of vegetation.

This could help you thwart the bone chilling winter winds, reduce your cooling costs in the summer with a south wall filled with living greens or just create a beautiful living, salad producing fence in your backyard!

It all comes back to your situation and goals

The spacing that you choose really depends on your needs.

We design these towers to be as basic and flexible as possible so that you can use them for commercial production in a greenhouse, or to cover the wall of your garage; so that you can use them as accents in your garden, or use them in industrial production techniques in warehouses; so that you can really do as many creative things as possible with them.

We are super pumped to see folks growing in freight containers, and warehouses, on the sides of buildings, in greenhouses, on rooftops and making towers the centerpiece of their installations.

People are using towers to clean up wastewater and for live sales in restaurants and grocery stores.

ZipGrow™ tricks of the trade

All of our farmers have their own methods and tricks- practices unique to their style of growing and market. As you learn to grow with towers, you too will come up with your own preferred spacing and growing style. This gives you the basics on spacing, but how you end up spacing in the end is completely up to you.

We’re happy to help you as much as we can as you work on spacing. Don’t hesitate to ask us questions- we’ll do our best to answer them!

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