Would you rather decorate your landscape with only ground covers or only climbing vine plants?

If you like the "Would You Rather" game, check out this index of other questions. https://permies.com/t/238000/Permaculture-Edition

Would you rather have to decorate your landscape with only ground covers or only climbing vine plants?

This is a tough one for me, but I'm going to go with climbing plants, as I would have fun building trellises and walls to put them on.

Ground covers as the wind here will shred climbing anything given a chance.

Ground cover….I already have vines.

Ground covers, for sure! We struggle bad, with rain erosion, here.

 I would rather have to decorate my landscape with only climbing 
vine plants because most of them have pretty flowers.

Ground cover. The climbing things don’t need me to plan them. I am in Northern Ontario Canada.  Couch grass is everywhere & incessant. Is an endless battle.  A lovely aggressive ground cover that can drive back the couch would be grand.

I think climbing plants sound better here. And there are plenty of good food plants among the ornamental vines: rose hips, kiwis, runner beans, whereas good fruiting ground covers like wintergreen need very specific conditions to survive, and others—goutweed and golden archangel deadnettle—are fine as greens, but quite invasive. The richer soil here also prefers tall plants, and a ground cover could easily be taken over by a fragment of goldenrod root.

I'm "Team Groundcover" and that groundcover would be strawberries.  Yum!

I will set myself up with team "Groundcover"

Here, we farm rocks, as much as anything else.

Every year or two, my wife covers her freshly weeded flower beds with mulch, which turns into food for weeds that are as plentiful as the rocks.

A year or two, I decided to mine a mound of dirt for its rocks, lay down a couple layers of black plastic, then cover it with the mined rocks. Three years in, all the paint scrapings and leaves aside, the three large beds I did yet look good, and the selected ornamentals in them look fine.



SIDE NOTE: We had two pine trees my wife planted about four decades back.  They produced pine cones that seemed to be competing with the rocks.  

Raking pine cones was a pain, so I looked at the idea of vacuuming them.  A 16 gallon shop vac worked fine for that, if the cones were freshly fallen and hadn't opened yet. After they opened, they'd plug the 2-1/2" hose.

Meanwhile, back in my shop was three dust collectors. Two are monsters, so not very portable, and they require a 240 volt power source.  A third I bought off craigslist for this purpose. It's a little 1 horse Delta.  

I modified the base and wheels to make pulling the collector into the yard possible. That meant swapping stock, office chair like wheels for ones more akin to what you see on a lawn mower (the bigger, the better, within reason).

Also, I have a dust collector pre-filter called a Super Dust Deputy, sold by Onida.  It's called a cyclone and it spins 99% of what's pulled in through its four inch hose out before it ever gets to the collector impellers.  I modified the large, plastic barrel it's mounted on so it has a built in (on) hand truck, making it easy to move too.  I installed a plastic view port to allow me to see how full it was getting.

The two things and the 20' hose look strange out in the yard. The neighbor mentioned something about crazy, but went on to say watching the cones and leave disappear into the vacuum was impressive.

I'd looked at commercial versions, but ALL of them just pulled everything right through the impeller.  I use mine to vacuum paint scrapings off gravel and, because of the cyclone, don't have to worry about beating up on it with cones and rocks.  

Too, my aviator sun glasses might survive being vacuumed this time, since they would not be subjected to mechanical forces.

Kelly Craig, I just have to say...that is totally badass!

As far as my rather...since I battle bindweed most of the time, I would prefer ground cover. Can I get a redo on what is growing all over my property?

Decorating with ground covers or vines, and I think the question is phrased so that letting vines grow all over the ground doesn’t count, but they can make wonderful ground covers,

But,

My preference is vines.  I like to let them crawl over the 6 feet high chicken “wire roof”.  That is covered in grapes.  The chickens have to jump up to get occasional grapes and grape leaves.

Hops give summer shade and die to the ground in winter, so as not to block the sun when we want it.

Passionvine , does a more exotic flower exist?

Morning glories, cardinal climber, wisteria, kiwis, honeysuckle, clematis, do climbing roses count as vines?  Bouganvilla, climbing hydrangea, nasturtiums.

Scarlet runner beans, and hyacinth beans, squash and cucumber vines, tomato vines, gourd vines…

All but the bouganvillas grow in freezing winters, and there are tons more if you don’t have a freezing winter.

What I like about vines , in addition to the summer shade and winter sun feature, is that they are SO USEFUL in so many ways.  When I divide spaces with vines on a trellis, it makes the garden appear “bigger”.  And you could make a maze with vines on trellises.  Vines on pergolas modify the climate below.

So much fun to be had with vines.

Vines all the way. Like Thekla said above, the usefulness and climate modification is also prime for me.

One of my favorite posts (and gardens) on Permies is Leigh Martin's Sky Gardens and Chicken Orchards:

https://permies.com/t/154864/Sky-Gardens-Chicken-Orchards

That is such an inspiration to me!

I live in the mid-elevation desert SW and we get 70mph winds here at times. I've seen that once, and 50 mph winds lots of times now. "Normal" spring winds are *only* in the 35 mph gust range!

Vertical gardening makes it all work, though we have to use strong trellises.

We have vines up all over for windbreaks and shade creation - microclimate creation. Everything from perennials including blackberries, grapes, evergreen passionflower and deciduous passion fruit, and trumpet vine to annuals like cowpea, lablab, and of course melons and other circurbits decorate our trellised gardens and the general fencelines.

Online I also love the gardening style of  AsianGarden2Table and their videos on YouTube.  I learned a lot from their videos about how to build affordable, hurricane-sturdy trellising.  They came up with a system of a metal conduit frame to which they attach sturdy twine. Then they grow more than half of of the plants they sell up the twine trellising! It's impressive. They even grow sweet potatoes vertically.

At the end of the season, they cut the vines and twine down with a hedge trimmer, and compost everything twine and all.

Other gardeners' vertical techniques inspired me to go vertical, which has about doubled my production area, as well. Probably tripled now that I think about it. Because I also layer vines. Learned that from a Geoff Lawton video of Zaytuna Farm.  If the trellis is sturdy enough, you can put many types of plants on it. I have one trellis now with overlapping grapes, runner beans, passionflower and then various, changing annual vines.

Meanwhile, here's a happy trellis year in my garden, from a couple years ago...

I'd choose only ground covers for this one. I'd have fun gathering as many different varieties as possible and seeing what variations I could get - different heights, different flowering times, which kinds grow where.

Matt McSpadden wrote:If you like the "Would You Rather" game, check out this index of other questions. https://permies.com/t/238000/Permaculture-Edition

Would you rather have to decorate your landscape with only ground covers or only climbing vine plants?

ground covers, so many to choose from!

sandy

and so fun to say. A JU GA. a JOOOO ga. lol  

Climbing vine plants, you can do a lot if you have creativity in your soul, and I am told I am very creative!