Hesitant Handyman Builds - On Gardening & Making a Tipsy Strawberry Planter
Our yard has been a constant project since we bought our house. The first summer, a friend helped me till up the back yard so I could install new sod. Last summer, we made a pretty sizable change to our back yard with the addition of a paver patio to place our fire pit on. (Like the alliteration there?) Part of that project involved digging out the dirt beneath the patio area so we had room for crushed gravel and sand under the pavers so they could be level with the lawn.
Our entire lot is pretty flat, and the edge of the backyard wound up turning into a small swamp area during the first couple of years in the rainy months. (If you’re not from Oregon, that’s basically Fall-Winter-first two thirds of Spring). Amanda and I weren’t too keen on keeping the swamp there, and wanted there to be some variation in the landscape, so the dirt we removed for the paver patio became berms behind a dry river bed that we installed last year.
The goal was always to have different plants and flowers growing on the berm, but we ran out of time when doing the installation (we were having Alton’s first birthday party in the backyard, so the goal was more “good enough” than “perfect” by the time we finished). So this year, we’re adding the flora to the landscape.
There are two things I feel you should know here. 1) I love planting things. 2) I hate actually trying to keep them alive/manage them. The first year we planted a vegetable garden, Amanda was pregnant with Alton, and as a result we didn’t really take the time to care for the garden. The last couple of years I’ve planted things in our garden and then straight up ignored them after the first couple of weeks, only to come back and find some dead, while others have mutated into something straight out of a Syfy horror film. Seriously–have you ever seen a cucumber as big as your head? I have. Several. At first I thought it was a squash.
I’m working on getting better at keeping them alive, it’s my goal to get a productive year out of the vegetable garden (the kale and rainbow chard are already trying to block that goal for me, which just reinforces my personal belief that leafy greens are inconsiderate jerks who want to ruin our lives) as well as bring some beautiful new landscaping in without killing it.
Our first stop was at Home Depot, where we picked up tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, basil, kale, and rainbow chard for the planter beds. In addition, Amanda had an idea based on something she saw on Pintrest for a tipsy strawberry planter, so we picked up five terracotta pots and five strawberry plants, as well as some potting soil. More on this project later.
For the berms in the backyard, we didn’t see anything that really spoke to us at Home Depot, so Saturday morning we checked out the Newberg High School greenhouse sale. Our local high school does a plant sale every year during the month of May where they sell off starts of plants grown through the school’s horticulture program. We wandered around and found a pretty good variety of plants that we thought would add some color and variation to the berms. Here’s what we decided on:
Bellflower
Astribe – Fanal
Fuchsia – Blackie
Hosta
Evergold Sedge
Columbine – Tequila Sunrise
Heurchera – Blackberry Crisp
I’m excited to share how they wind up over the course of the summer, as they become established in the ground. Keep up with my Instagram and I’ll keep you posted!
Back to the strawberries–As I mentioned, my wife had a project in mind for the strawberries that would keep them out of the planter beds (as such, hopefully keeping things more manageable and not turning into a nightmare planter box takeover (strawberries left unattended are known to do that–ask me about my hula berry experience). Here’s what I used to make the tipsy strawberry planter a reality:
Hardware
Hammer (A small sledgehammer like the one below would work best in this situation–I don’t own one myself, so I wound up making due with a regular old framing hammer. This is on my list of things I need to buy)
Software
1/2″ Rebar – cut to length (This’ll depend on how tall of a tipsy strawberry planter you’re going to make. Ours was approximately 5′)
Terracotta pots – For our tower, we used 5 pots. I don’t think I’d go much higher than that, if you’re scaling I’d probably scale down.
Planting soil
(We also used Sequoia, which I was unable to find on Amazon)
How to:
Drive the rebar into the ground
First thing’s first–I needed the rebar in the ground. We painted our brown for a separate project we’d done, this was a leftover piece about 5′ long. to ensure that it’s stable, I drove it about 2′ into the ground at the spot where we wanted to put the planter, next to the raised beds in the backyard.
Alternate tipped pots on the rebar
We threaded the rebar through the drainage hole in the pots, alternating which direction the pots were tipping back and forth. It’s a pretty funky effect, but I love how it looks.
Add soil & plants
Pretty self explanatory. We added a small amount of soil to the bottom of the pots to start, then added the strawberry plant, then filled the rest of the pot with the soil.
Special thanks to shop dog Mahler for making a guest appearance in the project photos!
I’d love to hear what you folks are planting this year! Let me know in the comments or on social media using #HesitantHandyman!
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