Hello dere, steemians, and welcome to da greenhouse, eh!
I had been wanting to make some vertical planters for strawberries since last year, and I finally got around to doing it this spring. When we had the 2 weeks of nice weather in March, I went to the hardware store and bought a 10 foot section of 4 inch thin wall plastic drain pipe. I had them cut it in half at the store to make it easier to put it in the car. I would have cut it in half at home anyway to make two 5 foot long pieces, so it seemed like a good idea to just have it cut at the hardware store. Once I got them home, I had to figure out how I wanted to form the planter pockets in the pipes, how many pockets there was going to be, and where on the pipe they would be.
I laid out the location of the cuts that I needed to make in the pipe, cut the slots, and then tried to use a hair drier to heat up the plastic so that I could form the indent for the pocket. It took a long time to get one pocket formed using the hair drier.
I figured out pretty quickly that I was going to have to buy a heat gun if I wanted to get anything done on this project. After I got the heat gun, I was able to finish the pockets on the one piece of pipe.
That was as far as I got on the project at that time because it got cold again and I didn't want to be working on stuff in the cold greenhouse.
A few days ago, I finally had the ambition to start on the project again. I took more pictures of the project in case anyone wanted to know how I made them.
Since I had one pipe done already, I started on the second one. The first thing I had to do was lay out the markings for where I wanted to cut the slots. This piece of pipe has printing that runs the length of the pipe with the pipe specifications. Since the line runs straight down the pipe, I decided to use it as the guide for marking where to make the cuts that would become the pockets. I marked out 2 rows of cuts, one on each side of the line. I staggered the cuts so that they were not directly across from each other. I started the first row 1 foot up from the bottom, and then 1 foot increments after that. On the other side of the line, I started 18 inches up from the bottom, and then 1 foot each after that.
Then I used a small miter saw to cut a 3 inch long slot on each line. That forms the edge of each pocket. I heated up the pipe on what would be the upper side of the cut with the heat gun until the plastic was soft enough to form, and then used a large ball peen hammer to form the pocket by pushing the soft plastic in with the hammer head and holding it there until it cooled enough to stay in that position.
The pockets didn't seem very large with just the upper plastic pushed in so I decided to pull the lower lip out a bit to make the pocket larger. The ball peen hammer didn't give me the shape I wanted, so I found a garden trowel that turned out to be just the tool for expanding the heated plastic outward and holding it in place until it cooled off.
That turned out to be successful enough that I did the same thing to the other pipe that I had previously made. So now I have 2 vertical planter pipe ready to be finished and planted. All I have left to do is to put the bottoms on them to hold the dirt in, and drill some drainage holes in the bottoms so that they don't get over watered and rot the plant roots. This is what I have so far.
I think these planters will work a lot better than just drilling holes in the side of the pipe like the one that I have with the strawberry plants in it. That one is hard to water, and the dirt tends to fall out of the holes because there's nothing to hold it in. I'm guessing that you could use the same building methods to make vertical hydroponic planters, with the proper bottoms for that application.
Well, that's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Some time this week, I'll finish these up and get them planted, that will be part 2 of this post.
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post, eh!
As always, feel free to leave a comment or a question if you would like.
May the Steem Force be with you!
Really cool :)
LOL
Oh bummer I missed this post so it's too late for me to resteem it. ) : It's a great tutorial. Both parts. It's giving me some inspiration!
Awesomesauce Amber!! love how you showed us with photos, can't wait to see the finishing touches. :)
@goldendawn check this out! :)
Thank you!
I try to do enough pictures so that the person reading the post has a better understanding of what I'm talking about.
yeah its much better that way! have you tried dlive or gif? vids?
I haven't used Dlive yet. I used to do a few videos, but the process of doing them with my camera and then processing them makes me less likely to do a video. Open mic videos are about all that I've done for a while.
i tried it yesterday and it wouldnt upload. open mic is nice!
Awesome! Hopefully we get an update when there's plant buddies growing from it. I see these on Pinterest alot, I might try to make a vertical garden once I start writing out a daily schedule so I can set aside days for certain things like this. Thanks for sharing! ♥
Yes, there will be updates for these. :-)
I still have to put the bottoms on them, fill them with dirt, and plant them, so there's another post right there. I'm looking forward to seeing how well the strawberry plants do in these planters.
Thanks for stopping by!
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