Pallet timber plant stand and "skateboard"

[GreenShoots]

My partner and I always end up with lots of little plants in little pots. We aren't plant hoarders, but we do like to collect interesting things, we're always propagating plants, and one of us has a habit of buying things to plant in the garden when she doesn't have time to plant them...

The solution? This simple pallet-wood plant stand, which I based on @MitchellMc 's handy guide How to build a tiered plant stand (which he based on @JI 's Garden planter stand).

All the crosspieces are pallet timber, and the vertical ones are treated Pine sleepers. I used the MicroPro sienna sleepers because their brown colour seemed a better starting point for staining than regular green treated Pine.

I modified Mitchell's design a bit to use less wood, and also to keep the whole structure open so it would dry more quickly after rain or hose watering.

I screwed it together with my trusty little Ryobi One+ 18V drill driver and gave it a few coats of Intergrain UltraDeck timber oil, and we're really happy with it. So thanks to Mitchell and to JI!

The plant stand was my second pallet project. The first was this plant "skateboard".

We used to have an old sleeper propped up on a couple of bricks to keep a lot of little plants off the ground. It looked pretty crummy. This looks better, and I put castors on it so it's easy to move to sweep behind it, or to put it under cover during protracted rain events.

Both projects were fun and satisfying and quite easy once I'd managed to pull the pallets apart.

Breaking down the pallets was harder than I thought it would be. A treated Pine one came apart very easily, but a couple of heat-treated ones put up a real fight. The nails were very long and threaded and their heads were very narrow and flimsy, which made them hard to pull out with a claw hammer or pry bar.

The heat-treated wood was quite hard and brittle too, and I frequently damaged it when using a nail punch to punch out bits of nails whose heads had pulled into the timber when I was prising the pallets apart. Those nails came out, but so did big, chunky splinters of the timber. Good thing I was going for a rustic look!

I'd never made anything like this before, but after seeing so many great pallet projects here on Workshop I decided to have a crack. I'm glad I did!

[Remarka6le]

Looks awesome @GreenShoots ! @MitchellMc 's guide is solid and it's good to see others can follow it so well. What plants have you got displayed on it?

[MitchellMc]

Lovely projects @GreenShoots! I'm a huge fan of recycling pallet timber, so any projects using it get an A+ in my books. Your re-design looks wonderful, and I'm sure it lends itself to being moved more easily than the one I wrote the article for.

The plant skateboard is a novel idea and seems like it would be fantastic when scorching days or torrential downpours are expected. So easy to wheel undercover.

Well done, and many thanks for sharing your terrific projects. I can't wait to see what project you tackle next.

Mitchell

[GreenShoots]

Hi @Remarka6le . Thanks very much! The plants aren't really a display. At the moment the stand is more of a holding pen for random bits and pieces.

But from top left...

• a cactus that I used to know the name of but have now forgotten.
• a vareigated Aptenia cordifolia left over from some planting that my partner was doing. They're great little semi-succulent groundcovers that spread pretty quickly, don't need much water and have nice little red/pink flowers.
• a little Echeveria that has stretched out over the past year. I'll decapitate it and replant the rosette in fresh potting mix so that it looks nice and compact again (I do this each spring)
• a Mandevilla or Dipladenia that my partner bought for some reason. It's a climber; not sure what she's going to do with it
• two succulents that I propagated from cuttings (I've forgotten what the spiky-looking one is. I want to say that it's a Crassula of some sort)
• another Echeveria
• a little red-tinged Aloe of some sort
• a bushy succulent whose name also escapes me at the moment. My partner propagated it from a little cutting.
• an Aglaonema that my partner propagated by splitting it from a larger plant. They're good houseplants and low-rise landscaping plants that can take a fair bit of sun
• more Echeveria
• a little Euphorbia whose name I have also forgotten (I think I have the ID cards for most of these plants in a box in the shed somewhere...).

On the skateboard are some random succulents and a basket of spider plant pups (Chlorophytum comosum) that my partner is propagating from a bigger plant. The plants with the "elephant ear" leaves in the background are a purple-stemmed taro (Colocasia) that are super-easy to grow and propagate and have a nice, lush tropical look. They go great anywhere in part shade and you can even use them as aquatic plants – just drop a pot in your pond or water feature.

Thanks for your interest. And thanks for reminding me to dig out all my old labels so I can remind myself what half these things are!  

[GreenShoots]

Thanks, Mitchell! I couldn't have made the plant stand without your easy-to-follow guide! I still have most of a MicroPro sienna sleeper and some other treated Pine lying about so at some point I might make a smaller one to put somewhere else...

[Remarka6le]

Not a problem @GreenShoots ! I loved a lot of the plants you've displayed and was looking to grab a few, so thought I'd ask

We keep our labels in the pots most of the time, but we also keep a diagram of our larger garden area on hand so we always know what's what and how we go about watering / feeding on a schedule. 

Again, well done on the project  

[GreenShoots]

Hi @Remarka6le . It sounds like you're more organised than me. I always take the label cards out of the pots because it looks neater and I always think "I know what that is. I don't need a label to tell me!"

Which of those plants were you interested in?

[Remarka6le]

Hey @GreenShoots , just makes life easier in the long run if we can go over to our potting table and know exactly what goes where, what food it needs and how much water (we measure via time as we use a Ryobi pump and our DIY water tanks to water our plants) each plant needs (including scenarios if conditions are better or worse than QLD average).

We attribute a lot of that as to why our fruit trees are overperforming (including the vast rain), we were told dwarf Lemon & Lime trees are supposed to fruit 20ish fruits a year and we've gotten close to 80 on both trees.

As for your plants, these were what I was looking at :

Top Shelf - Middle Left & Top Right

Mid Shelf - Far Left & Far Right

Bottom Shelf - Far Left

Skateboard - Far left with the hanger

[GreenShoots]

@Remarka6le Wow. It sounds like your citrus trees are going great guns. Do you have any pics you can share? 

I'm not sure if you could follow my list, but let's see if I can fill in the gaps: 

Top Shelf - Middle Left (Aptenia cordifolia) & Top Right (Dipladenia sanderii "Guinevere". The tag says it's good for pots and hanging baskets. The closely related and very similar looking Mandevilla is more of a climber)

Mid Shelf - Far Left & Far Right (the names escape me, but I'll try putting them into a plant ID app). 

Bottom Shelf - Far Left (Aglaonema)

Skateboard - Far left with the hanger (spider plant, Chlorophytum comosum. These are just pups taking root. If you buy a mature plant from the garden centre they look much bigger and better).

[GreenShoots]

OK! Mystery solved, thanks to the genius technology of plant.id . I just uploaded the pics and it identified them immediately.

They're both Crassulas, both closely related to the popular "jade plant", Crassula ovata.

This spiky little number is Crassula tetragonia, aka "miniature pine tree". The one on the plant stand is one I grew from a fragment that broke off this  one when it fell over one day.

 

The squiggly one is Crassula arborescens, aka "silver jade plant". Over time it can grow to be 1m-1.5m tall and wide.

You can't go wrong with succulents, unless you plant them somewhere where the soil is going to be too wet. Then they'll end up looking horrible and/or dying...