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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

DIY pallet garden


A few months back when we were filling our raised garden beds with soil we ended up coming home with a pallet from Home Depot. Apparently we had to buy a lot of soil! This was my first pallet and I knew I wanted to save it for something. We've all seen the hundreds of things you can do with a pallet!

Here is the pallet. I didn't change the actual structure of the pallet for this project. I wanted it to be as simple a project as possible.

All you need to turn your pallet into a planter is some form of weed blocker material. We had a giant roll left over from our garden. There are several types and sizes of this at Home Depot or most garden supply stores.

With the material you end up making several "slings" or "pouches" inside of the pallet. I chose to make 8 of them. I decided to skip every other slat so that the plants would get enough sun and have space to grow upward inside of the pallet before they would reach the next pouch.


This is the little formula I used for cutting my fabric. These are the measurements I needed for mine but all pallets could be different so I'd check your dimensions first.


Stapling the fabric sling into the pallet was the toughest part of the project.
The tough part was the awkward angles which resulted in staples that were not fully inserted into the wood. Which ended up looking ugly.

See how awful that looked? I was discouraged. But they were still holding the fabric in really well so I knew it would do the job and I was convinced once the soil and plants were added I'd never see the staples again.

This shot shows all eight pouches stapled in.

 

Then I was off to Home Depot for soil and plants. I chose a mix of herbs, succulents and flowers.
 

This one bag of soil ended up being the exact amount needed. If you are wondering about the twine at the top of the pallet here is the story on that: Originally I wanted this hung on the wall. Then we decided the final project would be too heavy to bother with all that would be involved in anchoring this to our stucco wall. The pallet alone was super heavy and then we still would be adding soil, plants and water to it! We decided to just lean it against the wall and I decided to put it on top of a garden bench for added height. The twine tie is to hold it in it's leaned position to the wall in case of wind or a child or dog pulling on it.  This will prevent it from tipping over and falling forward.
 

The next job was filling all the pouches with soil. I had a cute and helpful assistant for this step.


All that was left to do was add the plants and clear away the spilled soil.


I am super happy with the result and pleased to say all the ugly staples are no longer visible. The entire project from start to finish including my trip to Home Depot took about two hours. Well worth the time invested!

  

6 comments:

  1. Did you have to consider the plant location due to water on the top level spiling down to over-water the lower levels?

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    Replies
    1. actually the ground cover fabric I used does not let much water through so you do not need to worry about that.

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  2. I've been thinking of doing this lately! My husband is always bringing home pallets and we usually just end up using them in the fire pit! Thanks for sharing! I'm a new follower!
    -Ameryn
    www.ohsonifty.blogspot.com

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  3. This is such an awesome idea! Love it!!!:) I nominated you for the Liebster Award! You can find it here: http://fancythatnotion.blogspot.com/2013/06/liebster-award.html

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  4. wow thats interesting. never seen anything like that before.

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  5. Awesome idea! And really good tutorial & photos!

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