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.
