MiniProject: When a Wagon Becomes a Planter
I hereby claim for myself the title of This Generation's Martha Stewart. Tonight I shall skirt legal nuances, trod on the ethical, and the lie extravagantly and poorly in a misguided attempt to cover up the truth.
As your new queen of suburban fine living and crafty projects, I present to you a project I like to subtitle "Anyone can make a planter out of anything." In this case, it's a repro radio flyer wagon I picked up at an auction for three bucks.
This is a remarkably easy project that takes about 20 minutes (but the hours of mockery from your friends and family go on forever!). If you spend a little more time on it, you can come up with a more pleasing plant layout than Hodgepodge, the style I chose.
Step 1:
Drill three to five holes in the bottom of the radio flyer to help ensure the roots of the plants didn't get water-logged. Use your biggest metal-friendly drill bit.
Step 2:
Place rocks over the holes that will allow water to pass under, and around but not much dirt.
Step 3:
Dump good potting soil over the rocks and fill the container 80% to the top.
Step 4: Start inserting your plants. I recommend having a design before you start, because winging it inevitably results in what happened to me: I put in a flat and a half of marigolds and ran out of flowers. I grabbed some hen and chicks I'd been intending to plant in a corner of the pebbles, and planted them along the back fifth of the wagon.
Step 5. Water the plants into place.
Voila! You now have a rolling, portable planter that your family can mock you over, as well. I recommend planting annuals in it (at somepoint this fall, I'll have to transfer the hen and chicks - a perennial plant) someplace else in my garden.
If I have a spare moment in the next few days, I'll probably go in and move some of the plants around - I'm thinking of putting a hen and chicks cluster in each corner of the wagon, instead of leaving them all at the back - or going out, acquiring another half-flat of marigolds, and replacing the hen and chicks with all marigolds, all the time.
