Eco Mother's Day building garden boxes out of old pallets!

For Mother's Day this year we spent the day treating ourselves to some sunshine and fresh air by getting outside and working on our new garden project. In an effort to save some trees, our friend Evan came over to help build a garden box around our plants out of reclaimed wood from pallets. This is a really great idea that he has also been implementing with his students in their garden at school. Essentially all you need to create your own are used pallets, which he sourced from our "local" walmart, two hammers, and a saw. Heres how:

evan building the boxes :-)

• Break the pallets apart using the hammers (one acts as a lever/wedge, the other forces the wedge/lever in), then remove the screws or nails. You can save theses if they are in good condition for later use. 
• When you have the pallet wood in individual pieces it is time to design your box. Get creative! Evan says they play with shapes at the school to add some geometry to the lesson, or your can go utilitarian like we did for now and stick with a square shape. Of course depending on your design you may need to cut wood to fit. 
• When you know what size and shape you are using you can use the reclaimed nails or new ones to put the pieces together. Create the lengths you will need for your shape by combining pieces or sawing pieces off. 
• Add posts to the inside of the pieces out of the odd shaped wood pieced of the pallet, the post will be the part of your box that goes into the earth for stability.
• Take all the pieces with their posts attatched to the garden for your installation. Set up your shape on the earth and dig small holes where the posts will be. 
• Hammer the edges together and smile. You have just saved yourself money, the pallets from the garbage, and a tree from getting cut down! 

this shows the posts that go into the ground

As the boxes were being built we got some more seeds started. Andy came over to help with that project. Although this is new for us all, none of us can get over our intense desire to grow our own food. We currently have zuchinni, tomato, wheatgrass, sunflower sprouts, onions, peppers, parsley pumpkins and all sorts of other things either beginning or growing. Although this is Florida summer, we are optimistic that something will grow!

After starting the seeds, we began our next project of clearing space for some lettuce. In an effort to keep lettuce coming all summer we are going to try to grow it under the trampoline that has seen better days, we were pretty tired though so we saved most of that project for another day. All in all, our Mother's Day was a productive, costless, fun for everyone day. Gooby (the baby's nickname) even learned how to hold onto dollar weeds!