This project has been a LONG time in the making! This fall…Dave brought home a surprise for me one day after work. It was a pallet, which isn’t ordinarily very exciting. But, he had seen an article about someone who took a pallet and turned it into a vertical garden, and he thought it would be fun for me to do the same thing…so here’s what I did…
I painted it (Canadensis Gold of course!) and then I added fabric weed backing around the sides and the back in order to make it a structure that could hold soil and plants. Then, it got very cold…so I just left the pallet painted and empty over the winter. 
Once it warmed up, I put on my flip flops and purchased soil to start filling in the entire pallet. It takes A LOT of soil to fill up the pallet. I had originally bought 4 bags thinking I could make two pallets, but it wasn’t even enough for one! My suggestion is to buy extra and return it later if you don’t need it…
Then, I took a trip to my favorite place on earth…Terrain in Glen Mills, PA. If you live anywhere within two hours of this place, I recommend clearing an afternoon for lunch and shopping here! I purchased all my plants at Terrain, and I tried to get things that were hearty and perennial. I played around with my layout for a while before I started planting everything.
Annie gets a little bit jealous when I spend too much time in the garden…she doesn’t like when the plants get all the attention. Here’s a picture of her trying to blend in with nature…
Anyway, after about 3 hours of packing all the dirt into every corner of the pallet, I was finally ready to plant, and here’s what the pallet looked like at the end of the day. I needed to leave it on the ground for a month so that the roots could take hold, and then it would be ready to lean up against the wall. In four weeks…
…it looked like this! My pallet garden had grown out of control! It was finally time to lean it up, but I had to give it a big haircut first. 
Luckily, it was a sunny day, so Annie didn’t mind me spending time with the plants…
So, I trimmed the plants back, and Dave helped me lift the very heavy pallet into place. If you are going to try this, it is really important to have strong layer of fabric weed backing…trust me!
It’s worth the effort though, I love the way it turned out!
