26 October, 2019

the summers die one by one - how soon they fly on and on!

Today, a friend and I made a garden bed frame using pallet wood.

It turned out to be a pretty intensive process, partly because we were working it out as we went along, but we started at 9am and finished around 5pm, with a morning tea break and lunch (about 90 minutes total). A lot of it was working out how to do what I wanted done with the tools that we had.

Firstly, there was cutting up the pallets. At one point early on, I nearly cut through the cord - ended up breaking through the plastic part but not actually exposing any of the electrical wire. lucky!

pallet bed frame - offcuts

The pile of wood that we got from five pallets was pretty decent:

pallet bed frame - sides

I got practise using the dropsaw:

pallet bed frame - dropsaw

Then there was measuring, nailing the 'palings' to the braces, and connecting the sides.

This is me using an angle-grinder to file off the tips of the nails. The nails I'd bought were a fraction too long, meaning they stuck out of the other side of the wood.

pallet bed frame - finishing

Squaring it up was an absolute nightmare, partly because of the corner posts I chose to use, partly because we were a bit lackadaisical with the measurements. But, after a lot of back and forth on how we were going to do this...success!

pallet bed frame - finished

And the chook tractor fits nicely on top of it.

pallet bed frame - with tractor

So, that's one - on the Crepe-Apricot bed.

I'd like at least two more - for the Apricot-Avo bed and the Avo-Shed beds. Ideally, I'd like four more - for the two beds previously mentioned, plus the Plum-Stone and Apple-Crepe beds, just so the backyard has a single aesthetic. Anyway, ith the Sydney Edible Garden Trail 2020 coming up, I need to start putting down my design on paper, so there's a better record of how the design has changed over the last five years.

But this is the last photo of the day:

Bed frame

On Monday I'll be planting out the bed, most likely with Jolly Roger corn and...pumpkin? Some kind of melon? More dried beans? I don't even know right now. Have to think about it some more.

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