Make your own Strawberry planters

[jjannie]

Found online a way to make strawberry planters out of pallets. Often you can find pallets for free or low cost on KSL classifieds. The link below gives you the concept, keep in mind she is using European pallet for the one in video but the guidelines are the same even for the non-European pallets but you won't have feet like she does - we used scrap 4X4s for our feet. Included are pics the 2 we've made but they haven't yet been planted up, I'll post more pics as we progress and plants grow. 

How to make a better Strawberry Pallet Planter - YouTube

We'll see how they grow! 


 1. Side view after painting. Painting these took longer than building them!

 2 End and inside views

 3. We laid chicken wire in the bottom to give some support. 

 4 We then put landscape fabric overtop of the chicken wire that comes up to first opening we can plant in and filled it with some Utelite soil to hold it nicely in place. 



Next on our to-do list is to dig up the strawberries we currently own to see how many we have we can use, supplement them with any new ones we may need. 

[wiperhunter2]

Great post and pics Jil, thanks for sharing this with us. Think I'll give this a try later this week.

[jjannie]

Great post and pics Jil, thanks for sharing this with us. Think I'll give this a try later this week.

 We were even able to reuse many of nails from slats to reposition/reuse them for other areas, but the feet we attached using the longer deck screws

[wiperhunter2]

Great post and pics Jil, thanks for sharing this with us. Think I'll give this a try later this week.

 We were even able to reuse many of nails from slats to reposition/reuse them for other areas, but the feet we attached using the longer deck screws

I did not notice in those pics that you had the feet attached, did you add them later or are they just hard to see in those pics?

[jjannie]

We used some 4x4 scrap we had on hand. The Euro pallets will have feet you can repurpose but the ones we had did not. I'll be posting some progression pics this weekend. We've cleared out our 'old' strawberry area and got it all cleaned up and later today we just may be planting our plants in our planters. Many of the June bearing strawberries are already producing berries while still in grow their grow pots.

[wiperhunter2]

We used some 4x4 scrap we had on hand. The Euro pallets will have feet you can repurpose but the ones we had did not.  I'll be posting some progression pics this weekend. We've cleared out our 'old' strawberry area and got it all cleaned up and later today we just may be planting our plants in our planters. Many of the June bearing strawberries are already producing berries while still in grow their grow pots.

I had to modify the pallets I got to work as well, so I just screwed two 2x4 together for the feet. I still haven't taken any pics of mine yet but I'll try and do that today.

[jjannie]

That should work as well. Here are our progress pics

First we cleaned out the area of old plants (saving many of them to reuse) and the soil was a rich loamy soil from us amending it several times in the past. The nearby tree also has sent roots up from underneath to get to watered soil so we also cleared it out.  Then we set out the planters and began layering them up. Now you're supposed to use straw to keep soils from washing out. In the video, the pallet slats were much closer together than ours were so we did our best to keep straw in place. So hopefully once the plants fill out and everything settles in better it'll look nicer.  We put 18 plants in each planter.

Note - this area you'll notice has been deer and bird proofed - a huge problem we have around here. 

More progress will be posted as we go through the summer months with these basically freebie planters.  Fingers crossed. 

[wiperhunter2]

Not as pretty as your strawberry boxes and nowhere near as many plants in mine as you have in yours but here are some pics of mine.






Also instead of using straw to stuff those openings, I used chicken wire and black bedding material before filling with dirt.

[jjannie]

That should work just fine. That is what is so nice about about these planters - you can be so variable in how they are made, but its nice having them raised up like we do, so much easier on the back and knees. We still need to make up the watering drip/soaker system to keep them nicely watered, so the time being we can just water them by hand. 

Did you get June bearing or Ever Bearing strawberries? Our old batch was mixture of two, the ones we purchased were all June Bearing. Also strawberries freeze and freeze dry/rehydrate so nicely. They make great snacks when freeze dried or we can freeze some for summertime drinks- a frozen berry dropped into lemonade is so yummy.

[jjannie]

Took a progress picture of our planters thus far. we did each enjoy our first ripe berry yesterday and the plants seem like they are happy so far. 

[wiperhunter2]

Took a progress picture of our planters thus far. we did each enjoy our first ripe berry yesterday and the plants seem like they are happy so far. 

Wow, that is amazing to get them this early. I guess Berries are more tolerant to the cold than other plants, plus all that straw likely helped.

[jjannie]

Agree, they must handle the colder temps way better most garden plants. Even as we dug up our old ones to repurpose we saw that they were in great shape and starting to grown nicely. Guess to winter these over since they are not in the ground like old ones were we may need to protect them a bit more than we used to do and make sure they don't totally dry out over winter, maybe we can occasionally give them a drink.

[wiperhunter2]

Agree, they must handle the colder temps way better most garden plants. Even as we dug up our old ones to repurpose we saw that they were in great shape and starting to grown nicely. Guess to winter these over since they are not in the ground like old ones were we may need to protect them a bit more than we used to do and make sure they don't totally dry out over winter, maybe we can occasionally give them a drink.

After reading your post,I went outside and checked our plants and there was at least 4 berries starting to form with one being much bigger than the other. I was surprised because I had not even noticed them last week.

[jjannie]

Sweet, that's nice since you have everbearing ones, they must be happy. We got our drip lines set up so ours will get auto watered by the sprinkler schedules, hope ours keep blooming so they'll set even more berries than they have so far. We have mix of everbearing and June bearing strawberries so we should get bumper crop for freeze drying and some to eat fresh, then smaller amounts throughout summer to eat fresh on salads.

[jjannie]

Here's the pic of what they look like now. (14 June) We added a few more plants we had on reserve in case some didn't survive but all our looking nice and even sending out runners for even more plants next year. 




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