Pallet Garden

Welcome to the beginning of the article on us building our raised gardens out of pallets.  This is hopefully going to give you a more realistic view of how this came together.  It's not all sunshine and roses like everyone on Pinterest wants you to believe.  But they are beautiful, recycled, and, in my opinion, simply wonderful. Not a day goes by that I don't go out back and look at them, touch them, talk to the plants growing, and just marvel at the fact that we started and FINISHED a project.  (More on the garden in a later post.)

Here is the project "site".  Needs some love, doesn't it?

Yup, this is the shaggy over-grown back yard, and the location of the soon to be raised gardens.

Here are the pallets we'll be using.  My husband is a fire fighter and they have a TON of pallets donated to them that are free of chemicals. This is important both in burning the pallets for training exercises, and for using the lumber in a garden.

So we began to take the pallets apart.  Easy enough.  Saw all the pictures on Pinterest, read the reports of how easy it was. This should be a piece of cake, right?

Uh ... yeah ... it didn't really work that way.  The thing with pallets, is that they are designed to be rugged. They are kinda built to NOT come apart easily.  So, the wood split, it chipped, it just didn't want to play nice at all.

We used a crowbar...

And a mallet...

And we ended up with a lot of scrap wood.  This was not what I had in mind. I was getting frustrated with my husband, "The guy on Pinterest said he did all of this in a few hours, and we've been at this all day! What is the problem?". I was getting frustrated with myself because I was doing this to be eco-friendly and all we were doing was making a mess.

So, we took a break and mowed the backyard to get a change of scenery.

Looks better, huh? What ... I'm no Martha Stewart (yet), and I did say "better".

So ... truth be told, my husband loaded the car back up with a bunch of our pallets and went to saw the suckers apart. Yeah .. screw the whole pulling of the nails idea, that was getting us nowhere.  Saw those bad boys right down the far sides, then pry up the middle nail which is usually easier to pry because there are less rusty nails in the center beam. When he got to the shop where he was using the saw, he found a bunch of one foot tall "scrap" 2x4's in a large pile.  BINGO!  We'll take those, if you don't mind.  PERFECT!

And we started to build.  (YAY!)  3 of the boards were the perfect height for our found 2x4 scraps. Again, using what someone else thought was trash is one of those things that just makes me happy. We did buy the screws used to hold everything together. We debated using nails again, but my Honey wanted to use screws, and he was the one dealing with me "suggesting" things all day, so I let him screw it. (ahem)  We used 2 screws per board to anchor into the 2x4.

Even Boo helped when and where he could.

TA-DA!  Look what we did, Mommy!  Here is our garden.  Now lets go get the seeds!

Here is an interior shot of what they looked like as frames.

We made 3 boxes total for our back yard. I am VERY happy with the choice of 3 smaller ones as opposed to a larger one.  I have room to walk between the beds to tend to my plants very easily. Each box is 3'x3'. And as you can see, I've got about a "Kevin-spaced" width between each. Kevin is our cat, in case I have failed to mention that in an earlier post. I especially liked this picture of Kevin and our son, Conner, saying hello.

Then I lined the bottoms with old news paper. I did this to create a weed barrier that would decompose after ensuring no weeds were coming up through the base of the beds. I also lined around the edges because this was where I placed the pavers to give it a "finished" look. 

Here is a shot of the pavers going around the 3 as a single unit. I did not put the pavers down the isles between them. There is still nothing there but the newspaper still at this moment. I'm not sure what I will use there, perhaps just mulch.

There are medium sized river rocks under the deck, so I helped them migrate down to the back side of the beds. Again, using newspaper as a weed barrier.

Then I filled them with dirt.  I added some of my own compost, shook in some shredded paper, and began to plant things to see what I could manage to grow. I bought extra dirt so I could level out the patio that I began building last year with both pavers and large slate pieces that came with the house when we bought it.

The gardens and the patio make-over will be another story.