Recycle Pallet Boards and Nursery Pots To Make Neat Planters

This is one of my favorite garden DIY projects! 

We first made these five years ago and they are still going strong all year long in our garden.

It is cheap, fairly easy to do and gives me the BIG planters pots I want for my yard.

We noticed the big pile of empty tree pots at our local nursery and bought

 a couple of 15 gallon size for $6 each. 

We already had a pile of boards from dismantled pallets,

 so already this project is right up my alley...

CHEAP!

Here are the finished planters. 

I LOVE the different shades of the used boards and the rough grain. 

These nursery pots have a generous lip around the top which make

 the finished planters look neat.Before....and after!

The Welding Man trimmed each board to fit and we attached them

 with our handy nail gun using brads.

The nail gun runs on a small air compressor. 

It's one of my favorite tools for projects like this.

Just look at the neat colors and wood grain!

Sarlac Pit?

Here's how the brads look once the boards are attached. 

We used long ones so they would penetrate all the way thru and

 give us a generous length to bend down inside the planter. 

We used a block of wood and a pair of needle nose pliers for this part. 

This is the largest tree pot we've redone.

 It is 22 gallon, I believe, and it holds a full size rose bush aand two Walkers Low Catmint plants. 

We dry brushed it withour house trim paint and added a 

mitered board frame around the top for a nice finishing touch.

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Pallet Boards and Nursery Tree Pots = Vintage Style Planters on a Budget!

Gardening season is almost here and I was eagerly looking for some big vintage style wooden planters for my garden.

Dang! Big planters are SPENDY!

So look what we did...

Here's our solution using FREE wood salvaged from pallets and really cheap tree pots from our local nursery.

This 23 gallon planter is 24" across and 14" high. It was only $6 and

 it is plenty big enough for loads of flowers or veggies.

But yikes! It was ugly.

But here it is NOW.

Oooh aaaah!

It has just the perfect vintage vibe I was hoping for!

Look at this lovely FREE wood we salvaged from old pallets. 

We did not have to pull the pallets apart. Some of them were already falling apart and the others we just cut between the support boards. Two old pallets gave us got plenty of lumber pieces long enough for this project. 

Ahem. The Welding Man cut them to length with his big manly saw.

The boards are a mix of fir and cedar and have not been chemically treated, so the sawdust was not a hazard.

For this project we decided to go under the rim around the top of the planter. We laid out a few boards  and marked them before cutting off any of the ends that had nails sticking out.

Laying the planter on its side, we fastened the boards with a slight gap between them at the top because of the angle on the pot. We totally eyeballed the spacing so it isn't perfect. Then we used my favorite power tool of all time...the handy dandy air powered brad nailer.

 Kachunk! LOVE that brad nailer!

Ahhhh! Loving how this project is coming together As you can see the brads are sticking through to the inside of the plastic. The ends are easily bent down by hand or with a pair of pliers. If you cut them off you lose some of the fastening power of the brads and the boards could come loose.

 

The cost for these two vintage style beauties? $12 total for both of the pots. The pallet wood was free and we already had the tools and the brads.

We didn't even have to sand the boards!

I like them alot! 

Tomorrow I will do a  bit of dry brushing to the boards with the turquoise blue paint from the deck and maybe a bit of white. Don't know yet if I want to paint the black rims at the tops. I'll let you know and post photos if I do.

Don't you love it when an idea becomes a project and it works and it's just so darn CHEAP?