Leave your vegetable garden on the ground and take to the sky!
Pallet Salad Garden 365 is a step by step method of growing leafy green vegetables all year round in containers off the ground.
A Pallet Salad Garden using fish box containers is an easier and alternative way of growing vegetables that avoids the pitfalls of traditional ground based vegetable gardening or container gardening in static heavy containers to a new and versatile gardening experience.
You might still be wondering, what is a pallet salad garden, what are fish boxes, and why is this all good for growing edible plants?
Fish boxes are used to package and keep fish fresh. They’re a great alternative to traditional planters in container gardens and you can get them for free.
A pallet garden is a modular container garden off the ground and has 3 significant advantages compared to growing plants in the ground.
- You can comfortably tend to your plants at waist level without hurting your knees or your back.
- High off the ground, your plants are better protected from common garden predators.
- Ultra lightweight plant containers can be easily moved around if your plants need more sun or more shade or if you want to change how your garden looks.
There’s one important distinction to be made about the pallets used in my suspended garden – my pallets are primarily used to keep my fish box containers off the ground and create storage space underneath.
Other types of pallet gardens use modified pallets to create mini planter pockets for plants. They look pretty, but they’re too heavy and too difficult to move.
Wait..hold on! This looks like a lot of work??
I won’t lie to you, this all takes some effort.
You have to find discarded wooden pallets or buy them.
You also have to find free foam fish plant boxes from your local fish restaurant.
Then you have to fix your pallets together to make a base structure for your plant boxes and maybe apply some weather protection if you want your pallets to last longer than 2 years outside in the rain.
Only after all this work will you start having fun planting and watching your baby plants grow and enjoy collecting leaves for your salads.
You can still do your traditional container gardening in pots, planter boxes or grow bags but you’ll lose the benefits of the pallet garden method.
Honestly, l totally understand if you want to quit now before getting sucked in.
I’ve made my choice, what about you?
Starting a Pallet Salad Garden
To go about starting a pallet salad garden you will first need to source 2 essential components: two identical wooden pallets and one or two foam fish-boxes.
With the rise in people using pallets for hobby construction projects, hardware stores are now selling them and if you don’t mind the extra expense, you can get started on your garden straight away.
Foam fish boxes are easy to get hold of and l pick up mine from outside my local Japanese restaurant on trash collection day.
Which plants are we growing?
The focus of this guide is starting a container vegetable garden with lettuce.
Lettuce is easy to grow from seed, it’s hardly bothered by diseases and it grows all year round.
And despite its delicate looks, lettuce is a tough and hardy plant and largely trouble free.
Below is a selection of my favorite lettuce varieties.
Clockwise from top left:
- Butterhead varieties like 4 Seasons are generally small loose-heading types that have tender soft waxy or buttery leaves with a delicate sweet flavour. They can be pale green, yellow or red
- One of my favourite oak-leaf varieties called Grenadine produces leaves loosely arranged on the stalk, great for leaf picking. One thing to be aware of; when the plant gets to the end of its life, the underside of the leaves becomes prickly.
- Pale green Divina, another butterhead. It’s tempting to let them mature and become big and round but sometimes, the inside is rotten!
- Cos or romaine like Winter Density, are tall upright with thicker dark green leaves in an elongated head. They make a nice crunchy addition to your salad. Normally grown for hearts, you can also pick them as you would leaf lettuce.
- Bi-coloured batavia – Kamikaze is guaranteed summer heat resistant and hotter summers are likely here to stay.
When you’re just starting out vegetable gardening, you want to choose plant varieties that ensure the most chances of success otherwise you end up being discouraged and quitting.
You can apply the same techniques you learn here to any other edible plants like culinary herbs and I’ll show you a very simple and unusual way of growing tomatoes.
Crisphead (image below), is the typical iceberg lettuce commonly found in most supermarkets. These types of lettuce require the most care and attention and are extremely sensitive to high temperatures. For this reason I do not grow them, I leave it to the specialists.
If you have a traditional vegetable garden in the ground, give my pallet container garden method a try, you might be surprised!
Up next – Gardening Nuisance Number One!