DIY How to make a raised vegetable garden box from pallets
DIY How to make a raised vegetable garden box from pallets
Follow the steps in this post to DIY how to make a raised vegetable garden box.
What you will need
Follow the steps in this post to DIY how to make a raised vegetable garden box. You will need to get 2 pallets to dismantle and recycle to make a raised vegetable garden box. Make sure they are not chemically treated. You can determine if they are chemically treated by looking for the initials MB stamped on the pallet, somewhere.
Tools you’ll need include a wrecking bar, hammer, saw and power drill.
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Materials needed beside the pallets for timber, you’ll need galvanized screws, geo mesh or shade cloth and soil.
Dismantle pallets.
The easiest way to pull your pallets apart is to start with the bottom side. This way allows you to get the most boards from the pallet without to much damage.
A good tip when pulling a pallet apart is to soak the pallet or wait until the pallet has been soaked by rain. The timber will swell and it allows the nails to loose some of their grip in the timber.
Use your wrecking bar to get the bottom deck boards off. When you have the 4 or so boards off the bottom of the pallet, the stringers are able to be levered off. I find hitting the stingers with a club hammer helps to loosen them. Because this gives you a small space to get your wrecking bar in between the stringer and deck boards.
From a good pallet, you should get around 10 deck boards and 3 or 4 stringers.
Plan for DIY raised vegetable garden box from pallets
The raised vegetable garden box should be a comfortable height for you. So that you don’t have to bend or reach to far. We make the length the same as the shortest deck board.
Here is a drawing of the raised vegetable garden box.
The length is 1000 mm allowing you to cut off split ends. Your stringers are cut to your comfortable height. We cut cross braces from the stringers and check them into the legs.
A deck board runs between the cross braces and forms the bottom of the garden box. You can have the sides go straight up & down or have them on an angle. Deck boards are used as diagonal braces and give you somewhere to screw rest of the deck boards. An example is the image below.
Putting it all together
Screw your legs and cross brace together with galvanized bugle screws. you’ll need 50 mm and 75 mm screws. Then connect the 2 sets of legs together with a deck board.
The rest of the raised vegetable garden box will use the deck boards from your pallets. Therefore use these for the top cross bars and diagonal braces for each end. Like so.
Once you have the diagonal braces at each end, you simply fill in the rest with deck boards. Then place some geo mat or shade cloth in the box before filling with soil because this helps contain the soil..
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That’s all there is to DIY how to make a raised vegetable garden bed from pallets. You just have to plant the vegetables that are in season. We made several of these which let us have vegetables all year round. Furthermore recycling pallets helps the environment.
