A gardening post because of all the sunshine recently!

Last autumn, I was watching an inordinate number of episodes of Gok Wan’s Fill Your House for Free. While I think I preferred Kirstie Allsop’s version, the phrase ‘made with pallet wood we sourced for free online’, obviously filtered into my head because when I saw some old pallets destined for the skip at college, I put one in my car without a moment’s thought. For the next six months, that pallet languished in my little garden, taking up space and definitely not improving its looks.

It took a sunny weekend and a spring cleaning burst last month for me to actually work out what I wanted to do with it. After removing the top planks and clearing them of nails, I sawed off the top and bottom sections which left me with five cuboids open at the top and bottom and five planks. I screwed the planks onto the bottom of the cuboids and had five pretty instant mini planters. I stained them and sank them around the edge of the gravelled part of my courtyard. Then I filled them with trailing violas and started some sweetpeas and forget-me-nots germinating for later.

Here are those results:

Burying the bases was more time consuming than I thought and getting them level was a pain but once it was done I was happy with the results, even if it did highlight how drab the rest of my garden was looking for the time of year. Next step – something bigger!