Pallet Gardening the Delaney Way

It’s all the rage. I’m not pretending to be an excellent gardener or even a good gardener. I wing it. I’m just going to share how I’m doing things. This will be my fourth garden in my fourth backyard. I've done this gardening method in two cities in Texas and one city in Colorado, so now I’m trying my hand in Oklahoma. This will be my largest garden if everything produces. I’m really excited to share this with my 16 month old daughter, Elliott, who loves to help. She gets so excited when we go outside to work in the garden. Mostly she likes to play in the dirt and move it around with the occasional dirt snack (See below). Soon enough we will be able to pull carrots out of the ground. Yay!

To start, you need pallets. We drove down alleys and just kept our eyes peeled. We stopped and asked a couple businesses that had some laying around. You can also check craigslist, but usually there is no need to pay. I would make sure the pallets that you choose are marked with a “HT”, which stands for heat treated. I would also check to see what was on the pallets because you don’t want anything with chemicals.

While Elliott and I started moving dirt my husband Dylan got to building. There are multiple ways to utilize a pallet when gardening. For my standing herb and flower pallets Dylan used pieces of wood from other pallets and completely filled in the back portion. We then made 3 shelves where the herbs and flowers would grow. There will be gaps or holes where dirt can fall through, so we laid landscape fabric down and it held the dirt in well. Another option is to use landscaping fabric to create a back and shelves. Maybe double layer it. Use a staple gun to hold it in place. My other standing pallet is for cucumbers. I just made a single shelf on the bottom and plan to let the cucumber vines crawl up the pallet.

We were going to do raised beds for all the veggies that need deeper roots but didn’t have the budget for all the dirt. Raised beds would be simple enough you just need to deconstruct the pallets and reconstruct into boxes, sizes are your choice. After we decided not to do raised beds I still wanted to go with the pallet theme so I had Dylan make frames that would sit on the ground and give a nice look and organization. We slightly recessed the frames into the ground and filled with a mixture of dirt and topsoil.

These are some examples of raised beds that you can make out of pallets:

What’s going to be growing in my garden and devoured by my family? Herbs (parsley, rosemary, lavender, chocolate mint, citrus mint, oregano, cilantro, basil) spinach, arugula, mesclun, carrots, black beans, onions, zucchini, squash, bell pepper, jalapeno, and tomato.

I'll post again when everything has been completed and we start to see a crop!

-Ashley