After restoring wood in April’s D.I.Y. column and refinishing metal in May’s, I joked that we might stick with the elemental theme and do earth next. Well, here we are: This month we’re getting into the dirt with indoor and outdoor gardening projects that you can accomplish whether you live in an apartment or a house.
My friend Zack is the most gifted gardener I know. He showed me how to turn my sun-blasted city balcony into an oasis, and taught me to treat flowerpots as jungles rather than display cases — that is, to plant them abundantly rather than dot them with specimens. Halfway through this month’s projects, I realized that a theme of reuse and repurposing runs through them, and I think I absorbed that from Zack, as well. After he turned a hollowed-out flat-screen TV into a hanging planter exploding with flowers and foliage, I began to see garden potential in just about anything that could hold a bit of dirt.
With that creative inspiration, I’m going to show you how to make a simple raised-bed planter without using any power tools, and with the sort of scrap lumber you may already have lying around. We’ll turn secondhand ceramics into indoor planters with the help of inexpensive diamond drill bits. And we’ll turn a piece of driftwood into an air plant herbarium using little more than a bit of wire.
Whether you have a single sunny windowsill or an acre to work with, I hope these projects will help you see garden potential everywhere, too.
Raised Garden Bed
Raised beds turn a corner of your yard into a vegetable, herb or flower garden, and they don’t take a lot of skill to build. Using purpose-made concrete blocks to align and anchor standard two-inch lumber is the easiest method of all — requiring only a handsaw, a measuring tape — and it’s the one I chose here.
For materials, I reused the 2-by-12 boards from an old and barren raised bed that came with my house; you can also use 2x6s. A try square — a tool used for marking and checking 90-degree angles — is helpful but not necessary.
The concrete blocks are made specifically as corner pieces for raised beds, with slots that fit the 2-inch lumber. I got mine at Home Depot, but they’re widely available and cost about $4 each. I used a caulk gun and construction adhesive to glue the stacked blocks together for extra stability, but you don’t have to.
The trickiest part of designing an L-shaped raised bed is calculating the lengths of the boards on the inside of the L: The inside-corner block subtracts from the overall length you’re aiming for. It’s easier to set the outside and end board lengths you want — eight, six, and two feet in my case — then place all the blocks and measure the inside lengths directly. (Easier still, just make a rectangular bed.) But even with that complication, this bed took me only an hour or so to put together.
A few additional considerations: I built the raised bed on the patio for demonstration purposes. If you’ll be placing your bed directly onto soil, you may want to lay garden cloth on its bottom by stapling or tacking it to the boards; it will help stop weeds growing up from below. On a well-drained concrete patio like mine, it’s not necessary. But don’t put a raised bed on asphalt, which won’t drain properly, or on a wood deck. Not only would the deck rot underneath it, but the weight of the soil would likely exceed its weight-bearing capacity.
Treated pine lumber, which I used, is considered safe for vegetable gardens, but you can also use untreated pine; it just won’t last as long. Untreated cedar boards are pricier, but can survive for a couple of decades — even longer than treated wood.
Turning Pottery Into Planters
Almost any ceramic container can be turned into a flower pot or planter; some of my prettiest ones were bowls and vases that I found at thrift stores. All you need to do is add a drainage hole using an inexpensive diamond coring bit and a drill. A set of 10 bits in various diameters costs about $10 at a craft store or online.
In each planter, I put a strip of garden cloth (cut from an old grow bag) on the bottom, then a thin layer of activated charcoal (left over from another project) to encourage drainage, and packed three succulents in with succulent soil mix (necessary for these plants). If you don’t have garden cloth, any synthetic fabric will work to cover small drain holes like these, and the charcoal isn’t vital.
Since there’s a drain hole in your new flower pot, you’ll want to protect whatever is underneath. I used black melamine sushi trays that I found at a restaurant supply store — a great place to pick up reasonably priced, stylish dishware.
Dirt-Free Air Plant Herbarium
I found this piece of driftwood years ago. Completely hollow and split end-to-end on one side, it seemed destined to find a creative use. An air-plant herbarium it is.
Air plants, native to the New World tropics, get moisture and nutrients from the air, so they don’t need soil or a container of any kind. There are various ways to mount them for display. I combined two common approaches, making a bed of Spanish moss (found at any gardening center) in the hollow to give the air plants’ spindly roots something to tangle up in, then wiring the plants loosely in place to keep them stable until the roots take hold.
Air plants should be happy in a sunny room — though they don’t like direct sunlight — and need only a regular misting with water for care. Use your imagination when planning your own air plant herbarium — a weathered board, gnarled twig or gilt picture frame could all look great.
Happy gardening, and see you next month, when the topic will absolutely not be fire.
The post Room to Grow: Three Small Gardening Projects Anyone Can Do appeared first on New York Times.
