Last year, I planted peppermint in my garden. This year, peppermint took over my garden. To control it's growth, I removed all but a potfull of the herb. But I put it in a plastic planter…and I thought the plastic planter was kind of ugly. So I bought some wood and started building a wooden planter around the plastic pot. I had no idea what I was going to create. I just started cutting wood! I knew it had to be bigger than the plastic pot. And I wanted the wooden slats to be about the same size as the wood on our hardwood floors. I also wanted a gap between each wood plank in the hopes that water wouldn't collect inside the wooden pot. The wood had to be pine, not pressure treated, but I settled for spruce once I saw the price of pine!
I think it weighs somewhere around two tons on the scale. There's a wooden frame on the inside then the planks on the outside. I have a very fancy mitre saw…but I can't cut mitres to save to my life. So I just used straight cut wood to build the lip on the planter. Feet are pressure treated fence post finials.
This will be exposed to all weather conditions so I kept the paint job simple. I decided to paint it to match some deck chairs I painted a few years ago. So the background is floor paint from our verandah, the white is Kilz, the yellow and green are acrylic gouache then I spattered everything with the same colors. Once it dried I used an electric sander to remove paint from all the edges and from some of the painted design areas.
I spray painted a rusty metal flower and fastened it to the back of the pot then added my planter of peppermint. We'll see how well the wood and paint combo holds up this summer.If I get one season out of it I'll be happy.
A lot of work for one herb. But it's an important herb to me. It's a major ingredient in the ice cream I'll be making this summer!