How-to: DIY Pallet Garden

Happy Hump Day, everyone! How are you doing? Are you taking time to check-in with yourself and give yourself the care, love, and attention you need? If not, it’s perfectly okay to set aside time for yourself to do whatever you want/need to do during ‘me time.’ If you didn’t get a chance to read yesterday’s blog post - “champagne fizz and fruity cocktails” - you can click right here to read all about how much fun I had catching up with my friend Emily in London! Also, if you didn’t get the chance to cast your free daily vote for me to be the next #MaximCoverGirl, you can click here to vote or click here to read about why it’s important to me (and then vote!). You can vote once every twenty-four hours for free, and I’d be so grateful for your support! I'm still in the running and in the top 10 of my group! Voting for round 3 ends tomorrow night, Thursday June 18th, so I’d love your support to make it through to round 4! Thank you for everything so far!! You’re halfway through the week, and to celebrate accordingly, I wanted to switch up our usual programming and offer a special edition DIY blog for today!

Early on in the pandemic quarantine, I was looking for fun projects to do besides making homemade masks and starting up my blog again with all my European adventures. My boyfriend stumbled across a photo of a pallet garden, and since his yard out front doesn’t have much space for a true ground garden, I decided I was going to figure out how to make a garden one way or another!… which is where this blog post comes into play! I am going to give you links to the step-by-step process of making a pallet garden, which I was able to do with a donated pallet from Mintie Corporation (big thanks to them)! If you're interested in creating your own pallet garden, you can look for shipping pallets at warehouses like an HVAC company or even checking your local Lowe's or Home Depot!

Step 1: Sanding! When you first get your pallet, it’s important to sand it down in order to avoid getting any splinters and to in order to be able to paint it more easily later (should you choose to paint). (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7cef5-yWzE)

Step 2: Wood Removal! Once your pallet is nicely sanded, you can use a hammer to remove any pieces of wood that you don’t want to use to create separate places for planting. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c74EBuj7l9o)

Step 3: Paint and Prime! Once you have all the extra wood removed from the pallet and have it nicely sanded, you can choose to use a primer as a base coat for a fun color down the road! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbAzgTrEBqk)

Step 4: Paint it a Fun Color! Once your coat (or two) of primer has dried, you can paint the pallet any color you choose! I went with pink since it’s my favorite color! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyMl0W-Yzms)

Step 5: Soil and Plant! Once your pallet garden is completely dry from painting, you will attach garden fabric to the backside of the pallet using a staple gun to create short pockets of garden fabric in which you can put your soil and your plants! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nYblyL5gts)

And that's the process! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out! Subscribe in the e-mail submission box below and reach out, follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so happy you're here and that I’ve been getting a lot of really great, fun-to-read stories, questions, and feedback from a community all over the globe from all different chapters of my life (and from people I don’t know *yet*)!

And please, if you have 10-15 seconds to spare, I would really appreciate your daily vote for me to be Maxim Cover Girl 2020. Click here to vote! Voting for round three ends this coming Thursday June 18th, and I would really appreciate your help and support as I continue to try and become the next #MaximCoverGirl by moving ahead into round 4! Thank you for your support! Click here or on the photo above to vote!

Sincerely,

Johny

P.S. - If you want to catch up from the beginning on this series of adventures, here's a cheat sheet to the posts (in order in which they were published):

1. Won't you join me?

2. grateful for starbucks and sandymount strand

3. Once Upon a December in the National Gallery

4. plant a smooch for that gift of gab

5. may the 4th be with you: Dingle style

6. cinco de mayo: the best Mexican food in Dublin

7. pizza in roma

8. mussolini’s window and the philosophers’ metro stop

9. father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife

10. it's the vatican, not the vatican't

11. spoiler alert: i did not lose my hand

12. more pizza and gelato and Neptune, oh my