April 4, 2010
By Virginia A. Smith
Philly Inquirer

It sounds a bit like a pet rock for gardeners, but consumers seem to love the upside-down Topsy Turvy tomato planter, which has been sprouting all over the marketplace.

Photo: Andrew Marx of South Philadelphia made his own upside-down tomato planters from five-gallon buckets. His results weren't great, but he learned a lot and is eager to try again this spring.

Bill Felknor, a folksy inventor from Knoxville, Tenn., has sold millions of his curious creations since they first appeared on QVC in 2003 - more than seven million last year alone, making it one of the most popular gardening products ever introduced.

"I give the good Lord 100 percent of the credit," Felknor said of his "hanging gardens," which grow tomatoes out the bottom of a soil-filled bag and are watered from the top.

Skeptics (there are many) ascribe Felknor's success to more earthbound forces: mass marketing and the ageless attraction of novelty. Here, the target audience is anyone looking for a no-muss-no-fuss way to grow tomatoes, the nation's number-one garden plant, and, perhaps, a conversation piece for the deck or patio.

Topsy is that, for better or worse.

"I sell it - of course, I do - and they're very popular, but I wouldn't have it in my yard. They look hideous," said Drew Carroll, a horticulturist at Feeney's, the nursery and garden center in Feasterville.

Topsy is everywhere these days. Besides QVC, where Felknor's tomato planters and other Topsy products are best sellers, they're in all the big boxes and thousands of Walgreens, Bed Bath & Beyond, CVS, and Ace Hardware stores across the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, and, soon, China.

This spring, four new Topsy planters will debut, including ones for strawberries and hot peppers. Later this year comes a Topsy "patio terrace," comprising six plastic plant-platforms on a stand.

Where will it end?

"The secret to inventing is as simple as can be: You have to find a problem and solve it," said Felknor, a longtime inventor, who previously worked in newspapers, public relations, and advertising. He contends that the idea for Topsy - a less labor- and space-intensive way for kids, city folks, and seniors to garden - came to him in the middle of a sleepless night.

It's a natural - times three, according to Scott Testa, a business professor at Cabrini College in Radnor, who grows tomatoes the old-fashioned way.

Photo: The Topsy Turvy strawberry planter is one of a series of new products being launched by inventor Bill Felknor.

Like any consumer group, he said, a certain percentage of gardeners are on the hunt for the hot new thing. With the increased interest in home vegetable gardens, even folks with little or no green space want to get growing. And the idea of being able to do this without getting dirty or having to weed . . .

"That's kind of the holy grail for gardeners, isn't it?" asked Testa, who has done consulting for firms that make novelty items, produce infomercials, and sell on QVC.

Carole Allen bought a Topsy last year for $9.99 at the Glenside CVS, where she works. Squirrels and relentless sun foiled attempts to grow tomatoes in patio pots, but a Topsy planter hung from a pole did the trick. Allen had delicious cherry tomatoes all summer.

"You have to water it a lot, and I used Miracle-Gro, but it worked. I just bought another one to try this year," she said.

Not everyone has been so lucky.

Lana Medinger, a master gardener from Glassboro who was looking to save space, grew a popular Jersey heirloom tomato called Ramapo in a Topsy Turvy on her deck last summer. The harvest was zip, which she blamed on the "grow bag" being too small to support proper root growth, and the plant got so heavy, it split the cedar post it was hanging on.

"I wanted this thing to work," Medinger said, "but it was really disappointing."

Roseann McKeever and two of her Roxborough neighbors tried Topsy planters last summer, too. The neighbors' plants quickly dried up, and McKeever had a puny total of 10 tomatoes for the season.

"We followed the directions and took really good care. My husband is a fanatic," McKeever said. "Topsy Turvy doesn't really work."

The Rev. Ronald Ferrier of St. Katherine of Siena Church in the Far Northeast had mixed success last summer with four planters on the rectory porch.

"From the road, they looked pretty, but we didn't get enough tomatoes to make it worthwhile," he said.

One planter produced lots of cherry tomatoes. The other three, filled with larger varieties, pooped out in early summer, and all four required copious watering.

"If I watered them in the morning, by 2 or 3 in the afternoon they were wilting already. It was really a pain," said Ferrier, a lifelong gardener who comes from a plant-nursery family.

He plans to try again this year - his pastor likes the planters - but with grape tomatoes exclusively. He thinks the smaller fruits are better suited to the size of the bag.

Diana K. Weiner, volunteer coordinator at Meadowbrook Farm in Abington and a frequent lecturer on new garden products, agreed. "The bigger the pot, the happier the plant, when it comes to growing veggies in any kind of container," she said.

Topsy Turvy "sounds easy, and everyone loves hanging baskets. But by August, these things get heavy. They're going to be huge. They'll break easily.

"It's a gimmick," Weiner said.

Felknor protests. "Anybody who thinks this is a gimmick ought to look at the pictures I have. These plants are hanging down six feet, loaded with tomatoes."

And so they are. Still, Topsy is just a planter, not a miracle worker. "People have to take care of it," Felknor said.

After seeing Topsy ads, Andrew Marx concluded that he could easily make his own. So he scoured his South Philly neighborhood of Newbold for discarded five-gallon plastic buckets that formerly held joint compound or paint. (Felknor's first forays into the world of upside-down involved five-gallon paint buckets, too.)

Marx and his wife, Becky Oot, have about 1,000 square feet of gardening space in two vacant lots they own next to their rowhouse. The soil's bad, so besides old buckets, they grow inside used tires and other found objects.

Marx drilled holes in the bottoms of eight buckets; pushed tomato seedlings through the holes, facing down; filled the buckets with homemade potting soil to cover the roots; and built a wooden frame to hang them on.

His yield wasn't great, and he had issues with watering and cracked stems, plants that were too heavy or that made a phototropic U-turn toward the sun.

But Marx, whose efforts garnered an honorable mention in the 2009 City Gardens Contest, is excited about trying upside-down planting again this year.

"That was my first year attempting gardening," he said. "It was more of an experiment."

After selling Topsy Turvy planters for a couple of years, Gardener's Supply Co. of Burlington, Vt., did its own experiments and last year began marketing a knockoff called the Revolution Planter. It's self-watering and touted for compact, bush-type tomatoes rather than the larger, heavier kinds.

"On the shoulders of Topsy Turvy, which was very, very successful," said company spokeswoman Maree Gaetani, "the 'Rev' is already in our top 10."

Gaetani acknowledged that the upside-down look is "a different aesthetic," one that likely will never replace the ever-popular containers and traditional gardens. "But there's no end in sight. I think upside-down gardening will be with us for a long time."

That's the plan, although Felknor insisted that Topsy's endless reinvention was not about money.

"The house is paid off. I'm reasonably fixed," he said, citing instead his desire to find an easy way to engage non-gardeners, especially children, which was what Topsy did for his family.

"This is the culmination of what I've lived and breathed all my life," Felknor said. "Gardening is my love."

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