Vertical Garden from Free Recycled Styrofoam

Step 3 Make your cuts

Make your cuts - You can use an X-acto knife or another knife from your kitchen perharps. These types of knifes will cut the foam quickly, but leave pellets of foam everywhere. You could also use a hot wire knife. The cuts will be smoother and there won't be any foam pellets, but it goes slower and the burning foam smells some. These are the four types of cuts you need to make:

• A rectangular hole at the top of the planter that’s roughly 20″ long and 3″ wide. You're going to pour your soil through this hole.
• You'll make between 5 and 10 holes in your planter that are about 2.5" in diameter. I just traced the bottom of the plant containter my plants came in. More holes will mean you can fill the front with more plants to make a thick plant wall.
• Two holes will be put into the back of your wall planter for hanging. I used the hot wire foam cutter for this as it’s the easiest way to make small holes. You could potentially drill holes in there as well I'd imagine. Put the holes at the top of the back of the wall planter spaced about 8″ apart.
• This is the one cut that's optional. It's for drainage holes. If you want them, I'd recommend having 4 spaced out along the bottom about the size of your pinky finger. Some details to consider:

  • If you’re planting a single planter inside, you won’t want drainage holes as the water will drip through the planter and end up on your floor. You could choose to wick water a planter without drainage holes if you want. There's options at various garden stores to for wick watering solutions. Alternatively you could use excess foam and make a water holder. You'd fill it with water and then put a shoe string or cotton string from the water holder to the dirt. The water will wick from the water holder through the cotton string to your plants over time. If you have your planters outside, you can put drainage holes in the planter. Also, if you’re planning on making a bunch, you may want the top ones to have drainage holes.. this will allow you to pour water through the top planter and the water will drip through one and then the other and so on. Warning – don’t go to crazy with this and have the planters stacked 10 high. It takes a while for each planter to absorb the water and have the water to drip through the drainage holes, so if you stack them too high, your arm will be sore trying to slowly pour the water into your garden. If you want the planters that high, you could make a resevoir out of more foam at the bottom of your wall of planters, you could put a pump in the bottom resevoir with a timer and the pump will pump the water up and using drip irrigation it will water all the levels of your vertical garden. The excess water will drip back into the resevoir at the bottom.

 

The planter held up to the wall.

Notice the hole to hang the planter on the back