Tim Nelson built a planter box out of a discarded pallet.
We have many pots on our rooftop patio but none are wide enough or deep enough to produce edibles other than herbs and the odd tomato. One thing that does abound in our neighbourhood is discarded materials from the local market. A broken, splintered crate destined for landfill inspired me one Sunday afternoon and I quickly set about creating a planter box in time for the spring planting.
First the pallet needs to be deconstructed. A trusty hammer and jemmy bar are all you need but try to keep the slats in as good a condition as possible. An easy way to decide the size of the planter box is to leave the length of the box as the original length of the pallet, making its width half the original length. The reason for this is it makes measuring and cutting simple, as you are only ever halving the length of the slats.
Constructing the side plates was simply a matter of nailing (or screwing) the long horizontal slats onto three vertical supports for the long sides and two supports on the short sides.
Construction of the base is exactly the same but you need to make the base plate roughly 40mm (four times the slat thickness) wider than the short sides. The reason for this is that when the sides and base come together, the vertical sides need to sit on the base for support, rather than being suspended next to it. If the short sides and base plate are the same width then this will not be possible.
Read the full article in ReNew 110This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 4:45 pm