We have been bringing home a ton of plants this spring.  Most of them are even still alive too!  Having the flower bed areas covered in rocks lets us do all sorts of potted plants.  Pots get expensive and often aren’t big enough, so I decided to make some customized cedar planters.  First grab a pile of cedar and start cutting.

I cut 8in boards to 24in length and made some 8in end caps.  It turns out a cedar 2×4 is actually 2 inches by 4 inches.  When you rip them in half they are still a decent chunk of wood.  I took the fronts of each box and milled an “H” into it.

A touch of spray paint highlighted the letters nicely.  I used a hand plane to remove the excess spray.  The box construction is pretty simple.  I screwed the long segments together and tied the sides and ends together through the 2×2 chunks.

With cedar wood, epoxy covered screws and a coating of thompson’s water seal, they should last a while.  I moved our two basil plants into one box.  The one on the left was in a plastic pot that never drained well.

For the other boxes I had help picking out the plants.  Looking around the plant section at lowes I found a pile of bees on the mexican heather.  They seemed to whisper, “pick this one!”

 So mexican heather for us!

Lastly, as I was standing in the checkout line a monarch butterfly was making a visit to a pile of scarlet milkweed near by.  That came home with me too.  By the time I got around to planting it was looking a little sad.  Hopefully regular watering will perk it back up.

The 8″ boxes are a decent medium size.  They totaled about 20 bucks a piece for the materials.  Next I will probably make a set with doubled or tripled up 6″ boards.