If you love doing DIY projects, we have a fun fall project for you! At Canopy Lawn Care, we often have wood pallets on hand that we receive our lawn care equipment and landscaping supplies on. As you can imagine, as a lawn care company, we are into sustainability around here. Some of our team members decided to come up with a few new ways to make use of these recycled pallets so they won’t go to waste! This easy DIY project is something that you can do at home this weekend!

DIY Fall Pallet Project By Canopy Lawn Care

Before you start your pallet project, we recommend writing down some quick project plans and a supply list. This will help you know exactly what tools you need to grab from the work bench and save you time when you head to your local lawn and garden store.

Step 1: Find A Sturdy Recycled Palette

Palettes have become somewhat of a hot commodity in the DIY world, so you can always find them on buy/sell/trade sites. It is also worth asking at your local farm supply or landscape supply store. Occasionally, they will sell them to customers or some may even give them away.

Step 2: Choose Your Plants and Flowers

For our fall pallet project, we chose hardy mums in three colors, creeping myrtle, bugleweed, and a variety of trailing ivy. Continuing with the theme of sustainability, we selected our plants based not only on their festive fall color, but also perennial options that can all be transplanted into the ground. Get these plants into the ground before your first frost and they should return again next year.

Step 3: Choose Your Layout Before You Plant

We recommend adjusting the layout of your plants and flowers and selecting the layout that you like the best before you plant. You can do this by leaving the pallet flat on the ground. Keep your plants in their pots so that you can move them around and get the right layout before you begin. This will help prevent the loss of soil from making adjustments after planting and will also save you time on cleanup!

Step 4: Cut and Staple Landscape Fabric or Burlap To Hold Your Plants

Pallets have open backs and bottoms. This means that unless you line the pallet with a landscape fabric or burlap, the soil and plants will fall right through. We chose burlap for our project. In addition to complimenting our fall theme nicely, burlap is also a cost effective, sustainable and biodegradable product.

Step 5: Stand Up Your Pallet and Plant Your Fall Flowers

We actually decided to use the back side of our pallet. If you wanted to plant more rows of flowers, you could certainly use the front side. The mums we chose will continue to grow, so we wanted to offer them plenty of space to expand. We made use of all three sections of the back of our pallet.

Our fall pallet was layered first with the ivy on the top row. We then alternated our creeping myrtle with 3 mums on the second row. This will create a “waterfall” effect as the ivy and creeping myrtle grow. On the bottom row, we alternated our bugleweed with 3 more mums in different colors.

Step 6: Don’t Forget To Transplant Your Perennials At The End Of The Season

Perennial flowers and plants can be a great seasonal addition to your landscape. After you have finished your DIY pallet project, be sure to plant your perennials in the ground so that you enjoy them next season! Mums will return year after year, while many trailing ground cover plants like we have used in our project are also cold hardy and may even last through a mild winter (this is of course dependent on your climate zone).

Do you have a DIY plant or landscape project you would like to share? We would love to see it! Find us Facebook at www.facebook.com/canopylawncare or Instagram at @canopylawncare.

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