Upcycled Wooden Pallet – Vertical Gardening ideas

19 May 2013

Upcycled Wooden Pallet – Vertical Gardening ideas

As you might suspect, I find it quite hard to throw away things that look useful. These pallets came to us with a delivery of DIY materials and have lurked half-buried in the shrubbery for months! We couldn’t get rid of them (and I could barely move them!) and we knew we wanted to do some sort of upcyclage with them – but what to do?

These pallets were crying out to be lovingly converted to a new use!

This beautiful reuse came to my attention and I decided to make vertical planters with them: http://lifeonthebalcony.com/how-to-turn-a-pallet-into-a-garden/ However, having carefully prepared the first pallet with landscape fabric and started to add soil we found it was going to be quite an involved process, as you have to lie the pallet flat and pack it very tightly with compost and plants to prevent soil leakage. This method also requires patience (in short supply in my garden!) as you should ideally leave the pallet flat on the ground once planted for a couple of weeks or more for the plants to take root.

OK, so that method is definitely good but on hold for now here as we need to get loads more plants and have one or two weekends of more clement weather! The taller of the two pallets is therefore prepped but not yet planted.

For the smaller pallet we adopted a different approach, which in a nutshell was this:

1. We removed every other slat horizontally to give better spacing for planting
2. Using plastic trellis (the kind you get on a roll) we stapled small basket shapes into the frame
3. We lined the baskets with green landscape fabric to hold the compost in place
4. After trimming the fabric a bit to hide it (quite fiddly) we planted the baskets up.

With makeshift trellis baskets added and planted up

It was quite easy and I think the resulting display is really cool. If you wanted to you could secure it properly to a wall as it’s quite heavy, but we have leant it against the wall of the house on the decking where it gets lots of sun (when we have any sunshine!)

Bear in mind as with all small containers in the garden it takes a fair amount of checking and watering during dry spells but if you’re too heavy-handed it will pour muddy water all over the decking!

My friend pointed out you can add crystal soil or water beads to the containers to help retain moisture, which I will definitely do when I replant. I think it makes a stunning addition to the garden and the shabby-chic look is right up my street 🙂