I'm trying to help a friend design a vertical strawberry structure in his very small backyard. It doesn't look pretty but he doesn't care about that. He's just trying to make it effective and productive. We're trying to make a raised bed with an open bottom thats attached to the soil beneath and with strawberries planted in the holes of the barrier. Because the structure is x x x, are we fine with just using top soil and compost? Looking up a lot of strawberry vertical gardens on the net, they all use containers so they all have the added expense of potting soil, which is something he wants to avoid.

A lot of these strawberry vertical gardens will use PVC pipes to get water down to the middle or bottom. This is what I've attempted to do but I think I put too many holes that also happened to be too large as shown in the bottom photo. There is a cap at the bottom of the PVC pipe with a small hole in it but nowhere near as large as the holes along the side of the pipe. What I found was that the water would rush to the bottom too much. So the bottom is getting watered, along with the top, but the middle doesnt seem to be getting hit. Instead of pulling out all the pipes and making new ones with smaller holes, do you think putting some soil, potting or topsoil, or compost or anything, inside the pipes would "plug" up the large holes and replicate the effect of having smaller holes? any other ideas of how to water would be well appreciated or what to do.

Just to clear up any confusion, the colorful forks there are used to identify which variety each strawberry is and to hold up berries from rotting on soil surface.

The white things inside the cinder block barrier holes are just dried oyster shells to hold some soil in. If we do another raised bed like this we will try lanscape fabric to hold in soil from falling out of the holes.

The soil level behind the pink garden edging and strawberries is lower because we ran out of top soil, but we're thinking about not necessarily filling it up to be level because we're thinking maybe we can water that area deeply sometimes and then hope that it may flow towards the cinder block holes of the plants in the middle and bottom of the structure, so basically another possible way of getting extra water to the middle and lower plants. If we were to plant something in that lower soil level area then of course it would be a plant that is better with more moist soil.

Any opinions are grateful, even if you think we should just scratch the entire idea because you think things will not grow and that it looks stupid. We are just trying things out!