Planter Project

Springtime!  Time to plant.  Man, I miss the old stone garden. The new place has a backyard and other folks in the neighborhood have pretty big gardens but our layout is not really the greatest for that sort of thing.  The path of the sun is wrong, the land too hilly, the sprinklers are in the way, etc. The best we can do is get some pots and planters and do some “square foot” gardening on the back deck.

Hey, let's do that then.  

We went to Lowe’s and found these:

They are made of, according to their labels, "heartwood".  Nice. Why don't they just say they’re made from "trees" or "stuff" or "tree stuff"? Can't a brother even get a genus up in here, what, what?  I mean, they look like they are cedar and I wouldn't expect them to be anything else, really, but why wouldn’t they have just said that?  

The Lowe’s website does say they are "stained to help resist the elements outdoors".  I am not really sure how to read that. All of my responses to that claim start off “Well... yeah, but...” and then just sort of peter out, shake their heads, and wander off.

In any case the planters are thin, flimsy, and expensive - the small one is $30 and the big one is $60. Plus they don't come with legs.   Well, that won't do...  

I bought a bunch of cedar, some spruce 2x4s, outdoor stain/sealant and got to work.  The lumber to recreate the the big one (larger area and deeper, but with legs) was $40. The second, smaller one was just a “Henry the Eighth, I Am” project (“second verse, same as the first”) and cost $20.  The stain/sealant was $8. Here are the pics:

Cheaper, larger, more sturdy, made from a known substance, and likely to last a few seasons. Plus I have plenty of extra stain/sealant left for other projects.  Groovy.

So far we have tomato, onion, green pepper, banana pepper, radish, dill, basil, and cucumber (to be trained up a trellis).  I will probably build another couple of smaller planters soon.

The clay pot was recovered from a cache of stuff I found under the deck when we moved into this place... along with what looked like a new chainsaw.  But, hey, that’s another boring story for another time...