Pallet Garden: The Creation

This blog post has been a LONG time in the making. In fact, I've been thinking about THIS post since at least April - that's 6 months of waiting - six months of gathering pictures and pondering what exactly I should say - or should I say - how I would BRAG ABOUT HOW WONDERFUL THIS IDEA WAS!!!

I had been talking to my friend Ashley for sometime about putting in a garden at her house. She has a gorgeous acre of full sun property that was already the home to marionberries, apple trees, rhubarb and a huge fig tree. It seemed only natural to expand the selection!

Looking into the different typed of gardens we could put in - the raised bed - was our best option (see she has gophers and we needed to put a screen under the garden). Well, I don't know what research you've done on raised bed gardens but... I quickly realized they are EXPENSIVE! Ash and I are cheap, and this garden wasn't that big of a deal, so the project seemed to end before it began. but then it came to me one day, while working at CB's Nuts, when we received a pallet of product.

The Pallet Garden was created - in my head anyways.

I started collecting all the pretty pallets from CB's and Ashley and I quickly went to work staking out the perfect location (we ended up moving it.... but this was still how we staked it out).

Those are bricks we found on the side of the garage - they marked the edges.

Next step was carefully taking the pallets apart - the goal was to keep both the 2x4 supports and the nice top planks intact. Come to find out... this was much harder than we thought. Pallets are apparently put together with special, spiral nails - which make it almost impossible to remove them without damage. So, to compensate for strong nails, Ash and I employed strong boys - only took them two hours to tear apart two pallets.

We ended up with enough boards to make two 5x5 gardens, two planks high (about 10 inches). That means we had 4 center support boards and 16 planks. After that it was a simple cut and drill project!

 

Cut each center support beam into three pieces at the red lines. Discard the center piece.

 

 Then take those pieces and stand them up on end, skinny part down. Attach two boards onto the wide, fat ends (with the curves both pointing in) with three 2-inch wood screws. 

 When finished with that, attach two more boards onto the ends of both sides.

Once the garden is put together, its time to deal with the ground. Mark out where you want the garden on the ground, and start digging. Dig about a food down, for the entire area the garden will cover. Once finished, if you have moles, voles or gophers, lay down some chicken wire. Then just set your wood into the newly, dug hole. It should fit snugly. Then simply fill in the hole/garden with your garden soil. We used a combination of sifted soil removed with the hole digging, store bough compost and store bought garden soil starter (and to fill in the rest, we used some home-combined dirt from next door). The goal is to fill the garden to an inch from the top of the wood.

Green arrow: grass line. Black arrow: where the chicken wire goes. White arrow: how high to fill the garden with dirt after all assembled.

 

Awesome finished product!!!

Don't plant immediately, the dirt will settle and you may need to add more before planting. But I'll talk more about that in the next post.

So lets re-cap. Pallets: free. Labor: free. 1 box of 2-inch wood screws: $3.50. Purchased dirt: $20. So a 5x5 raised bed that would normally cost between $70-$200 (NOT including dirt), only cost us $23.50 and a little elbow grease! Plus, it was an awesome weekend project (well, one afternoon per garden).