Seed Bench

Another quick and dirty 'project'...and still distracted by the gardening bug.

We needed a small bench on which to germinate our seeds indoors and then later put outdoors as the weather warms up. I certainly wasn't going to pay the ridiculous garden center prices, especially on something that might exposed to the weather! 

So ...

An afternoon's work, a handful of basic tools, an old broken pallet and some pieces of recycled wood from the dump for the legs and a £1.35 bag of screws later...

Our 'new' seed propagation bench was born.

These are the tools used, a square, pencil, gimlet (i love gimlets), screwdriver, chisels and a small saw.

It's not built to last a lifetime and it's not pretty ... but, It's functional, almost free and it was a great way to spend an afternoon!

Broken and discarded pallets can be a readily available and free useful source of wood, so keep your eye out for them!

2000 Page Views

Wow 2000 page views - another 1000 in just over a month! 

Now I feel really guilty due to my lack of posts over the past few weeks. So what's been happening? ...

Not a lot on the wood working front to be honest. I have been spending my time doing a little DIY around the house, building the raised beds and getting the garden ready for Spring. Lots of digging, collecting of manure and compost preparation etc.

I

The new 'Timber' has been stored away in the garden shed as it's a bit wet, not 'tree wet', but rain wet. It was soaked on the day of delivery, probably due to being stored outdoors at the wood yard, so I'm giving it time to dry out a bit. This could take some time with our damp weather over here in the UK, once Spring arrives and the sun starts to heat things up a bit I'm sure things will improve.

I did bring a board or two straight indoors to see how they might handle being dried faster due to our central heating. I had rough cut a 6ft board into three 2ft pieces for the beginnings of a project once it had dried enough. However, this resulted in deep cracks appearing predictably in the centre of what would be the core of the tree trunk.

I ripped out the cracked 2" wide centre from each 2ft length resulting in the following wastage.

After some planing I now have 'saved' the following 'good' outer pieces. Even with such wastage, the wood still costs a lot less than buying it straight from my normal wood yard. I will continue to keep an eye on these smaller pieces and put them to good use in the near future.

Anyway, more of a catch up post really, wood working will resume shortly I promise...