CONTAINER GARDENING: Elevated Planter Box from Pallet

To those who hadn’t read it yet from my older posts, Armin and I moved to our current apartment in winter of 2015. I was so excited to move because our new place has a garden! Although we had a very beautiful and spacious terrace from our old one, it didn’t include a ground where one can plant.But I was already happy to have my container garden.

It’s been a dream of mine to have a real garden because I love plants and flowers and gardening itself. Sadly, we were not so successful with our gardening efforts last year. We had a big problem with slugs eating all of our seedlings and plants. The only thing I was able to grow were tomatoes, beans, and zucchini. All leafy vegetables were eaten as soon as a leaf sprouts from them. It was really frustrating. I tried every DIY traps you can found on the internet. Some helped some but didn’t really stopped the problem, so I just gave up.

This year, we decided to go back to container gardening and our idea is to have elevated planter boxes. We also added some slug fence at the feet to stop them from climbing up the box. It is yet too early to say that this a successful solution, we just have to wait and see…     

We used two of this pallet to make our elevated planter boxes. We made them in two varying depths. 

Using a jig saw, we cut the pallet into 3 parts for the deeper box and 5 for the shallow one. The middle part will become the bottom part of the planter box while the 2 from the sides will form the side walls. 

The middle part will become the bottom part of the planter box while the 2 from the sides will form the side walls (deep box). We further cut the sides into 2 for the shallow box.  

Next, we removed the panels (3) from the bottom of the pallets and also  ‘middle feet’ from each of the side walls using a crowbar and hammer. Be careful not to destroy the panels while detaching as this will be used for the corners later.

 We turn the middle part upside down and lay it on top of the two side walls with the ‘feet’ facing inside the box. We used two 2″ nails on each corner and then added (a lot of) 1″ nails along the edges to secure the parts together. You may also use screws.  

This is how it looks like once the sides are nailed to the bottom part.

We measured the inner distance of the 2 side walls and cut 2 pieces from the excess boards in that length for the end corners. As for the deeper box, we used the panels. 

We had some lumber laying around from a previous project and it was perfect to use as feet for our elevated planter box. The size is 2oox5x2 cm and we used two of those. Each piece was cut into 4 (50cm long). We used 2 long screws to attach each foot to the corner of the box. 

We lined the boxes with the empty plastic bags from the garden soil we bought. Using a staple gun, we fix the corners and sides to the box. Then we poked some holes through the spaces as drainage.

Lastly, we filled the boxes with soil. I already sowed some seeds in both planters. The shallow one with leafy veggies like mustard greens, spinach, mangold. The deep one with root crops, like carrots, round and white radishes. I will update this post and add some pictures of the progress.

Updated: May 18, 2017

The spring this year was colder and there were times we got snow and frost up to the last days of April and early May. But at last the nicer weather has come and gave my babies the much-needed warmth from the sun.

Here are recent photos of the planter boxes, now with veggies I planted from seeds:

On this (shallow) box I planted (from left to right) kale, mangold, pak choi and mustard greens.

On the deeper box, I planted (top to bottom) french breakfast radish, white radish, and carrots. I also added some more mustard greens on the right and it seems it is time to harvest them. The carrots are slow though.

The french breakfast radishes seem to be ready to be harvested as well.