(playful music) >>Your harvest is one of the most enjoyable aspects of your summer garden, especially if you have a produce garden.

If you have a small space or you just wanna maximize your square footage, vertical gardening and planting up a fence is a really great way to do that.

Right here we have, these are Sunset runner beans.

They're a pole variety bean.

They're beautiful.

The bees love them.

We have a lot of mason bees and native pollinators, or this bumblebee right here.

And what we do along our fence lines is actually plant all of our pole beans, cucumbers, squash, and gourds all around the side so they can grow up and create a nice hedgerow around our garden.

And then that way we can maximize what's inside the garden with more upright varieties, such as okra, peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants.

We do this to really save space.

They love to climb and grow, and you can get a lot more bang for your buck throughout the course of the season and maximize your space inside your garden.

You can see here the flowers will naturally find their way up, and it's really an enjoyable thing to look at throughout the course of the season, once this starts to grow all the way around and create a little bit of a shade barrier and a little hedge around your garden.

It's really beautiful and it's very productive.

It's gonna give you tons and tons of beans and cucumbers.

It gets those cucumbers up off the ground, which is fantastic, and it also has an added benefit.

This is pest deterrent as well.

Towards the bottom of the fence, we have much smaller wire openings.

That's gonna keep out your rabbits and your squirrels.

Towards the top, it's a little bit more open.

I think these are four by four squares.

This is gonna deter the deer a little bit, but to keep them out a little bit more, we've got wire up here.

It's not just for the beans.

The deer can jump pretty high, and if they're just coming up to browse at your garden, they'll actually be deterred by this or get startled by it.

It works wonders.

I've been doing it for several years.

If you're willing to share a little bit from the outside and let them browse out here, they won't cause as much destruction inside your garden.

When you get to the end of the season, another added benefit from having beans that are pole varieties along your fencing is that when you're coming to clean this up, all you need to do, don't pull those beans out by the roots, just clip them off at the bottoms.

And you can actually pull all of those vines right out so it's all clean for next year.

Let the bean roots break down naturally over the course of the wintertime, because what's going to happen is when those roots break down, there's nodes on there that throughout the season have gathered nitrogen, atmospheric nitrogen.

It's going to break down naturally, and through the mycorrhizal network, it will make that nitrogen bioavailable to your subsequent years' plants.

So I would suggest planting a variety like squash or cucumbers, where the beans were the previous year, and rotating your varieties around so that you get multiple seasons out of this.

And it naturally enhances your soil quality.

Without having to spend a lot of money on amendments.

So I encourage you to try vertical gardening.

Its really easy to do.

And you actually get a ton of benefits.

Including more produce.

Good luck!