Strawberry pallet

Here is how I built my first strawberry pallet.  It's not quite complete yet, as I didn't have quite enough soil (Mel's Mix plus straw, leftover from my potato high-rise last year) to completely fill it, but I'm very pleased with it nonetheless.

Backstory:  This all began with planning for my compost bins.  I don't like my plastic compost bin.  It's big, but very difficult to turn the compost since it's basically a huge bucket with a lid.  I'd much rather have something I can pitchfork into from the side.  Also, I want a "double-wide" bin so I can have compost finishing on one side, and filling in on the other side with fresh material.  And I also wanted it as close to free as possible.  The trick, though, was to make something fairly presentable looking.

I was at a complete loss on how to do "presentable" AND "nearly free", and had almost given up on the "nearly free" part, when I stumbled across a website that showed compost bins built with pallets.  That is nothing new of course... but what they'd done was to stuff the pallets with straw books and planted the tops with flowers.  Brilliant!  I likey!

So, I set out to improve on the original.

I got a number of free pallets from the business next to mine.  They aren't all the same size, but hopefully "close" will be good enough.  I started with the smallest one, which was 2nd best in terms of overall condition.  I sanded it down and rasped off the worst wood splinters (mental note: belt sander does nothing to remove huge wood splinters), then stained it to match the lumber for my (soon-to-be-built) raised beds, some of which you can see in the background here.

I stapled a double thickness of landscaping fabric onto the back and bottom, and wrapping it around the sides as well.

 From there, flip over, fill lightly but firmly with soil, and plant away.....then water lightly.
 

These are Ozark Beauty ever-bearing strawberries.  From what I read on the package I have actually over-planted.  The spacing is supposed to be 24"... but I'd left the 15-pack languishing indoors for too long, so I'll move some later if need be.  To help it settle, the pallet will lie flat a while.

This pallet is much heavier than the straw-filled ones I'm planning for the compost bin--for those, I hope to use plastic planting bag for the berries and/or flowers I'll be using--so it will either become a fixed side  of the bin, or it may find another home.  Yay for more strawberries!