Planters for cheap

Our deck has several built-in planters. Each one of these has a shallow rectangular plastic box that holds a few inches of potting soil. These boxes are so old that they are simply disintegrating. Our budget for replacements was Not Much.

My solution is to replace them with plastic five-gallon buckets, cut to the right height. Our meat market sells empty, clean condensed milk buckets for a nominal cost (fifty cents each, last time I heard). Each planter has space for two buckets.

The plastic boxes were resting on some 2x4 supports to elevate them to the right height; underneath the 2x4s were a solid shelf, so I took those out, and then measured how tall the buckets needed to be. The height came to eleven inches, which is, conveniently, not on the thickened part of the bucket that the handle hooks into.

To cut each bucket, I started with a regular wood handsaw to start a slot through, and then continued cutting with a narrower saw with fairly large teeth, which I think is actually for drywall. After cutting, I used a sharp knife to trim and scrape and clean up the rough edges.

Then I drilled a few drainage holes in the bottom of each bucket, and threw in some flattened plastic bottles to loosely cover the holes and provide some internal drainage space, before filling the buckets with potting soil from the old planter box liners.

So far I've made four of these; two planters' worth.

The cut-off buckets still look like cut-off buckets, and not anything fancy, but they are only visible from above, and I'm planning on planting something with a bit of bushiness to it in them.