Pallet Garden

Good Morning!

Thanks for stopping by today!

Well, last week was the first day of the spring... we welcomed it with this sweet little guy in our garden...

We love having a garden; there's something about planting a seed and watching it grow, change and turn into something that will feed your family that makes me feel fulfilled - maybe it's my caveman instinct?  Or my family lineage coming out (my Dad's side were farmers/dairy men)?  I don't know, but I love planting, caring for and harvesting a garden! 

There are a few challenging aspects to our garden though... one being our sweet, hungry, adolescent tortoise, Rango... he's probably the biggest fan of our garden which is our biggest problem!  Last year he was able to break down fences to get a taste of the sweet little buds as soon as they started to sprout.  This year we were determined to find a way to keep our very hungry tortoise away from our garden, so a raised garden bed was really our only option.

So, our garden had to meet certain criteria:
1.  Our of Rango's reach.
2.  Inexpensive.  We've really been trying to watch what we spend and not buy just to buy.
3.  Reduce. Reuse. Recycle - when we purchased our home the backyard was a hot mess.  It still kind of is, but originally it had a ton of stones, boards, gates, bricks, rocks, etc that weren't really our style and that we subsequently removed but held onto for future projects.  Both Alan and I wanted to figure out a way to use what we had.

(Photo courtesy of lilikoikanoe.blogspot.com via Pinterest)

 

So, I was perusing Pinterest one morning, looking for garden ideas when I came across the photo above.  They'd used pallets as a planter for flowers - light bulb moment!  We could use pallets that we'd had in the back for our raised planter beds!  I started looking specifically for this on Pinterest and found these...

 

(photo courtesy of craftingcreatures.wordpress.com via Pinterest)

 

and this...

 

(photo source: Pinterest)

 

 

Both Big A and I loved the idea of combining these two ideas, we needed the pallets to be a little higher off the ground than they came (out of reach of our hungry little tortoise) and I LOVED the idea of having the rows formed and ready to be planted! 

 

Here's our version...

 

 

We actually made 3 of these beds and we're just starting to see the little sprouts take off!  Little A and I love going out to water and count the new sprouts and wondering when the next ones will take off.  We even made a chart to keep track of the timing so we know when to thin them, when to give up on some of the plants if they haven't popped up, when we can start harvesting, etc. 

Join us tomorrow for a tutorial on how we created our Pallet Garden!

Have a great day!
Andrea