Strawberry Pallet Planter
Posted by: TammyMy most recent gardening adventure come about from my desire to increase the production from my garden. I was researching vertical planters and came across ideas for planting strawberries vertically which led to finding a great video on making a strawberry pallet planter. It was a marriage made in gardening Nirvana: my love of repurposing wooden pallets and my desire for vertical planters. From this beautiful union, a strawberry pallet planters was born.
I want to give a big thanks to Lovely Greens for her blog post and great youtube video! Of course I couldn’t find the exact pallet that she had so I had to improvise a bit. I’ve closed off the side with wider pieces of untreated pine we saved from the shed tear down at our cabin. I still have to cut and add two more pieces at the top so I can completely fill in the top and add more plants.
I managed to dig up and save a few existing plants but I also ended up buying new plants. You can see the size differences in the picture. This single planter EASILY holds as many plants as my entire bed did. If you imagine this planter kind of flattening out, it would fill the current bed. Here in this photo, you can see most of the planting bed for my strawberries to the right of the planter.
The space to the right will easily hold another planter, easily doubling the number of plants I have.
Total cost for this project was $9.99 for the four bags of humus I had to buy (and I still have a bag left so technically it was about $7.50 for this project then). The pallet was free. The screws were from our existing supply (even managed to use up some odd sizes my husband had) and I even got a bit more confident in using a skill saw! I used up the rest of my landscaping fiber to line the outer wall of the planter to hold the soil in (cut “U” shaped holes to hold the plants) . We have a pile of soil that we’ve been using up (wasn’t the quality we were promised) and my compost pile doesn’t have an adequate supply to mix in, so this was the reason for the humus purchase. I also had two rotting straw bales from the archery “range” and added some of the straw to the soil/humus mix to lighten to soil (the rest of the bales will be used as mulch in the garden). The total project time was about three hours from first cut to last plant in the soil.
So a big thanks again to Lovely Greens and hopefully I’ll be sharing a picture of this planter with big, red, juicy berries by June!
