John's Fun Projects - Pallet Garden

Pallet garden

I made a pallet garden in 2022

All known pictures of it will be included here eventually. Sadly this project did not work, or at least didn't produce significant edible results because there was not enough soil or water. (update: I dismantled and disposed of this project because it did not work and I did not want some new neighbors to be annoyed, which it turns out they probably weren't.)

The last of my special paint(will insert link when possible) was used on this. It started with an old, not particularly usable pallet I received from storage at ws1. Every other board was removed and cut, then nailed to the bottom of each level to leave room for the plants. The back was covered with burlap. each level was reinforced by burlap.

The main mistake that lead to the failure of this project was trying to grow strawberries and other overly ambitious things like that. There simply was not enough soil. I thought the strawberries might spread around like vines and really take it over but they tried that, failed, and could never get going. It was short on water too and i intended to use my automatic watering system, which does work, but never got it set up outside, mainly because of a lack of a good garden battery solution, which is another project that I haven't even posted on this site yet.

This could be a much more effective herb or small flower garden, maybe edible flowers like Nasturtiums and/or edible weeds like sour grass and lambs quarters would work.

I think I'm going to take it down (I did, it's gone), and next year I'm going to use the same amount of effort to try and create a u shaped fenced in garden(add link when possible) instead. I still like the idea of a vertical garden like this, but the soil boxes would have to be much bigger than it seems to me like the average pallet allows for. I know there's lots of pictures of successful pallet gardens online, but that just isn't how it happened when I tried it. I actually planted things in it that a gardening book suggested, i might post something about that book here too.

Anyway, if i did try to make a vertical garden again it would have to be purpose built, but that would kinda take away from the low cost, high availability, and ease of manufacture benefits of a pallet garden. Maybe there's a larger size of pallet or some other, largely available item that could be used in this way that has more room for soil, if i ever see something like that, maybe i'll try it. I don't want this to hang out in the back yard of ws2, but if i had a more private, more remote place to put it, i would put it there and grow nasturtiums in it.