Here’s how you can make the perfect vertical garden for your patio at home with a pallet.

If you are passionate about plants and you have an outdoor area in your home, even if it is a small balcony, you will consider using a small corner to enhance your green heritage. On the shelf market there are very original solutions for placing plants as well as for planters, but few are more individual and spectacular than vertical gardens , made by hand from recycled materials such as pallets.

For years they have been used (there are people who still do it, but the boom has subsided) to make tables with and without wheels, and to make the base of “hipster” style outdoor couches . Well, the use of recycled pallets has evolved, and the trend now is to make planters if you only have part of a pallet, or vertical gardens using the whole pallet.

For this, once you do a Google search, you will see that you have many alternatives and options. Especially on YouTube. Below we’ll recommend a specific way to do it that seems to us to be the easiest and most successful we’ve tried.

To make our vertical garden with our own hands out of pallets, we follow the steps and recommendations of Martha Rosique, an environmentalist and day to day creator of Plantea, a company specializing in environmental sustainability in urban environments that also has its own store. Rosique also publishes on the Plantea blog , where we recorded this easy way to create a vertical garden using a pallet.

Tips to keep in mind

Of course, before starting, it is important to consider, as the expert warns, that vertical gardens have no drainage water collection, so it should always be placed outside the house.

In addition, it is important to place it on a solid wall or support so that it does not move, because it is very heavy, so you can not change places often, and it will not be very safe.It can fall, especially if there are children in the house.

As for what to plant, Martha Rozick assures that vertical pallet gardens are suitable for everything, “but in general I recommend that you use plants that do not require the substrate to be too wet, but that it dries out slightly between waterings,” she says. For example, “succulents such as sempervivums, or aromatic dryland plants,” he recommends.

According to the ecologist, the reason for this choice is twofold. “A consistently wet substrate always weighs more, which can make anchoring more difficult, and a wet substrate will make the whole system less strong. Finally, vertical gardens have a problem: irrigation. Because they tend to be elevated rather than horizontal, it is often difficult to keep them well hydrated. So plants that don’t require water will always perform better than ferns, for example,” he concludes.

How to make a vertical pallet garden with your own hands

This is the step-by-step Martha Rozick recommends to build a homemade vertical garden out of recycled pallets.

The list of materials is as follows: in addition to the pallet base, some sandpaper and electrical sandpaper; white chalk exterior paint, which “does not require surface preparation, it can be painted on any piece of furniture without removing the previous paint or varnish and without priming”; stapler; geotextile mesh against weeds; universal substrate; and plants that you intend to plant.

To do this, do the following steps:

Prepare the surface of the substrate. This is optional because painting would not require it, but pallets have a lot of chips, so to be safe it is advisable to sand it so it is smooth and polished. Sandpaper is easy to put on and take off with the sander.

Paint: with a brush, if you use the recommended white paint, it will look great because it is resistant to moisture, withstands UV rays very well, and the rustic finish it gives is perfect for vertical gardens.

Once the two layers are in place, it’s time to turn the pallet into a vertical garden. It’s made of geotextile mesh against weeds. The way Rosique does it is a little more complicated, but it’s better, he insists, to keep the substrate from falling under gravity, losing quality at the top. To do this, make individual bags of mesh over the space. You must have the patience and a little skill to cut the mesh so as to form a pocket for the space, and attach the mesh well to the pallet.

Spread the substrate all over the pockets. They don’t have to be filled completely because plants take up space.

Be creative by placing the plants as you like. Fill the gaps with substrate.

Wait 24 hours to rinse the entire set in shower mode. If there are holes, with the water drawn in, fill in with new substrate. And a full week for upright garden placement. If watering has left dirt behind, wait until it dries out and remove the dry soil.

Use washers, ties, or any other system to anchor it in place. Do this with anchors when you choose the final site.