Lockdown Fun in the sun!
Pallet gardens are a simple, fun, and efficient way to start or expand your garden. Children love participating in this DIY project as well. The following instructions are a simple guide to making a pallet garden of your own.
Supplies:
– one pallet (use only a heat treated pallet as others can leak chemicals)
– landscaping fabric
– staple gun
– soil
– seed starters
Step 1 – Staple the landscaping fabric to the back and sides of the pallet. If the fabric seems to thin, make two layers of the fabric. Be generous with the amount of staples you use so as to prevent soil leakage.
Step 2 – Fill the pallet with soil.
Step 3 – Plant the pallet with your seed starters
And that’s it! With minimal effort, a few readily available supplies, and a little fun, you now have yourself a pallet garden. Enjoy!
All you really need to do a little pallet gardening is a wood pallet, some good soil, and a few seeds. Using a wood pallet to start a garden can be a great space saver, plus as a bonus, there is no soil to til or weed. This is exactly the kind of project young children would love, especially if they could have their own wood pallet to work with.
Here are a few pointers when looking for recycled pallets:
Look for a pallet that has HT stamped somewhere on the pallet. This means the pallet was heat treated, or kiln dried as opposed to chemically treated.
Because you can never be sure chemicals were stored on an old pallet, or that there is some sort of bacteria lurking inside the recycled pallets, I would scrub the wood down with some bleach and soapy water and let it dry out before using it to plant anything.
Also, watch out for old, rusty nails or staples.
When I first pictured my wood pallet garden, I thought I would only use 3 wood pallets. But every time I walked by something about it didn’t look right. So I decided to expand the pallet garden to include 6 wood pallets.
One of the cool things about gardening, is there are so many different ways to grow food. So many containers to chose from, and more growing methods than I care to imagine. Everybody has an opinion, and their own way of doing things and I think that’s the best part.
No two gardens will ever been the same, or have the same growing conditions, but the desire to try new things is something we all have in common. Wouldn’t you agree?
So here we go. This is my new pallet gardening area. I planted more lettuce seeds this morning, and I’m ready to get started. Next on the agenda is getting the area mulched so it looks a little more put together and like it belongs in a suburban backyard.
If you an apartment or condo dweller and want to “grow up” a vertical pallet garden might be the way to go instead. Anyway you look at it, garden is about the coolest hobby on the planet.
