The Tree Shelf

The big project for the week was to remove a small, cramped closet from the kids' room, freeing up some valuable floor space. As usual, I completely forgot to take an actual "before" picture, so here's a shot from early in the process: The old closet is gone, the walls and ceilings repaired, but still no flooring.

A few years ago, we painted a tree on the wall over my daughters bed:

To tie in the corners of the room, we built a tree shelf for the newly-liberated corner.
This is the frame and a few slats of wood, the beginnings of the base and the bark of our tree.

Once all the slats are on, we end up with something like this.

A little paint:

And we end up with a finished base:

Base + shelves = the beginnings of a nice little project.

A top was built for our little tree, following the same procedure as the base, then attached and painted. A little detail work later and, Voila! Tree shelf!

A lot of the materials for this project were reclaimed from the torn-down closet. The paint was left over from the previous tree-related project, and the carpet was scrap. I bought a couple of pieces of thin plywood for the bark, but this was still a cheap and relatively easy project that the kids seem to like.

Square foot gardening

Back in the summer, I dug up some old barn wood and decided to make a raised bed for a square foot garden. I picked up some really cheap 1"x1" at the home improvement store to make the rails for the fencing. I don't really expect the fence cage to last for too long out in the elements, but the local rabbit population insisted that I come up with a temporary solution at the very least.



So that's it, basically. It's five feet long and three feet deep, which was just about right since we only have access from one side. I subdivided the box into fifteen squares, and my daughter and I went to planting.



It's pretty incredible how much produce we got from this little box. The vines growing up the back of the cage are peas, and I think we put in about 45 plants, of which maybe 30 grew well. I think we planted a little late in the season for peas, but the tendrils and flowers have been delicious. We also put in spinach, collard greens, turnips, beets, radishes, okra and carrots. Of those, the carrots and okra didn't work out. The carrots have beautiful greens, but no actual carrot at the end. The okra was probably the wrong choice for our climate. All in all, though, fantastic amount of vegetables for such a small area. With careful planting and some succession planting, I think we could do exponentially better next year.

Pallet planter

I had access to a big stack of pallets, and I thought to myself, "Hey, let's make something!" My grandiose dreams of a free four bedroom house quickly dwindled when I found I could only fit four pallets in the back of my Subaru Outback. You know the saying: When life limits your cargo capacity, make something smaller. So, I present the pallet planter!



So, it's rustic... Which is fine. It's also sitting in a recessed area beside the house on a base of gravel. It's about three feet high and a foot deep. The top has a false bottom, so there's only about 18 inches of soil.



This particular planter took about two and a half pallets to make, although I had a small amount of broken slats that I couldn't use. If you decide to try one for yourself, look around for good pallets. Two of the ones I picked up were oak, which makes for a good, sturdy and nearly completely weatherproof box. Also, unbelievably hard to disassemble. The other two were pine, which is much easier to use but also much softer and less resistant to the elements. Most of the pine is on the back and inside, where it can be slightly protected.

Here's my two and a half year old for scale...





Once it was put together, I decided to make a little scene out of , although that's still a work in progress. Basic ingredients: Some rocks, a small hosta transplanted from somewhere else, lots of moss and a tiny little Japanese holly.