by Jim Bessey

Created on: December 26, 2008

There are two secrets to building a great wooden planter. Secret one: start with a square plastic patio urn, and build your planter around it. Secret number two is for parents only: let your child help. This is just the right kind of project to share with a kid.

With all the choices available at home and garden stores, why should you even bother to build a planter yourself? The age-old answer is "because you can" - because it's an inexpensive and rewarding project that you can do in an afternoon, one that you'll enjoy for years afterward. Planters are small, so you can make use of leftover materials from larger projects. Or you can raid the "scraps" bin that many home centers use to sell off short lengths of assorted materials.

Start with a plastic liner; that really does matter. If you build your planter entirely of wood, no matter how good, it will eventually rot or crack. Redwood might be the only material you could use without the liner. Most garden stores offer cheap but durable plastic urns for patio plants. You want one that's square and has a turned lip around the top. The size of your liner determines the final dimensions of your project planter.

We're going to build a basic design: this planter will use only square angles, not tricky flares or curves. The beauty of this choice is that it goes with any decorator style and does not require fancy CAD-generated blueprints. Measuring and assembly will be straight-forward; your ten-year-old won't have any trouble "seeing" the idea and intention. That's what makes this project fun!

Measure the top dimension of your plastic liner, just below the rolled lip. Let's say that it's eighteen inches square. To keep things simple, we'll add three inches to each side for our wooden planter. The inside dimension will be 21" by 21", then. As with all great building projects, we start at the bottom: build a pressure-treated wooden base using six 21" lengths of two-by-fours. Assemble those pieces like the top of a pallet: use two(flat) as runners to hold four together. Fasten with weather-proof screws of about two and a half inches long.

The next step is a bit trickier. Place the base with the two runners on the floor, then put your plastic liner on top. Time to measure for height. Read the distance from the floor to the underside of your liner's lip. Let's say that this number is 23" (as an example). We want all the weight of the inner urn to rest on the base, so the top of our planter will be 23" from the floor.

For simplicity

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