Greetings fellow ebayers!

When we’re not spending hours on end at the computer taking care of ebay business, we like to grow our own vegetables. We’ve always gone with the traditional “in-ground” method of growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash, etc. We were rather intrigued when we saw the topsy turvy planters, and decided to give them a try.

Now, if you go onto QVC and read the reviews, you’ll see people are fairly split on it, if not leaning towards the unsatisfactory side. Some say they’ve grown more red ripe tomatoes than they could possibly eat, while others are saying they were lucky to get even one green tomato. I’d like to share our experience with it in hopes that you’ll have a positive experience with your topsy turvy planter!

First, you need to use good quality tomato plants or seeds in the planter. You can’t expect to buy a seed packet at Wal-Mart and have much success. We went to Lowe’s and bought their top brand of tomato seeds. This cost us a couple bucks more but was worth the investment. We planted them in early May, in a good sunny spot, using miracle grow potting soil, watered them daily, and gave them miracle grow tomato plant food once a week. The results were great, but then an issue came up!

We had originally put our planters on hanging hooks on two of our fence posts. Soon, the weight of the planters became so much that one of them fell off, and the other looked like it was leaning the fence post a bit. My solution was to bury a square gothic fence post (with no holes) into the ground, installed a couple of 50-pound rated hooks, and put the planters one on each side, in the same sunny spot. Then back to the daily water and weekly miracle grow regimen. The results continued to be red ripened tomatoes!

So to summarize, these can work as advertised….but you need to put in the effort to water & feed them more than usual. They definitely require more water & care then your typical ground-planted tomatoes. If extra work is not what you’re looking for, don’t bother with the topsy turvy. In hindsight, had we read a review like this we probably wouldn’t buy them either. At the time we bought them on QVC there were only 5 reviews, most of them good. Since we have them, we do plan to continue using them in addition to our traditional garden. We may even plant peppers in them instead and see how that goes. 

I hope this review was of some help regarding the topsy turvy tomato planter!

Thanks!

Steve & Jen

Ebay ID: OceanStateSports