Garden Shelves

During one of my many trawls through the internet to find inspiration for my construction projects, I stumbled across a picture of a small set of shelves that looked like a set of mini steps. These shelves had 2 plant pots on them and this gave me an idea. With a little bit of tinkering with the design I could create a larger version for more plants. This is the subject of todays project.

I found some old tongue and groove in the shed that would be perfect for the legs and shelf arms and also would make good bracers. I also had some lengths of rough pine and these would serve as shelf battens.
The first task was to cut the legs and set the others at an angle. To do this I cut the straight back legs and then decided on the distance between the front and back legs. This needed to be big enough to stop the whole thing being top heavy and toppling over. I settled on a distance of approximately 800mm. Now all I had to do was figure out how to cut the angles on the front sloping leg. To do this I put the straight leg on top of a long piece of tongue and groove, set the gap between what would be the bottom of the legs and then marked off at the top where they crossed. To get the bottom of the sloping leg accurate I placed a further piece of wood across the two and used that as a guide. To ensure I had the straight edge completely square I used the 3-4-5 rule which is basically Pythagorean Theorem. Now I am not going to blind you with science but I doubt there is a carpenter or fitter alive who hasn’t used this trick of making sure something is square. The rule is this. On one side of a corner, measure 300mm from the corner and mark it off. On the opposite side of the corner, measure 400mm from the corner and mark it off. If the distance between the two marks, when measured, is 500mm then the corner is square. Quite simple when you think about it and also very handy to the amateur craftsman.
Next thing was to mark where the straight edge crossed the sloping leg and cut the wood to suit, repeating this process for the other side as there needs to be two sets of legs. One set would just be silly.
Joining these legs was a problem I solved by deciding that the shelf arms would hold everything together. I then cut three pieces of tongue and groove and clamped them in place on the legs. The placement of these shelf arms was completely arbitrary. One had to be at the top so the tops of the legs could join to it and one had to be at the bottom but far enough off the ground to be of some actual use. The third one was set between the two. Once I had drilled, countersunk and screwed all the bits together and repeated this for the opposite side (remembering to mirror the first leg unit) I set about cutting the actual shelf battens. I didn’t want to make the shelves too deep so that they overhung each other as this would make the storing of taller plants a bit redundant. Instead I wanted the back of the lower shelf to finish where the front of the above shelf started. You can adjust this to your personal preference, of course, but for my first attempt, this is the way I wanted it to go. I used 30mm x 30mm pine for these with a 4mm hole drilled and countersunk in each end.
Once I had cut the battens and was about to attach them to the shelf arms I encountered the problem of actually fixing them to the leg units because the legs kept falling over. As I only had one pair of hands, I solved this by cutting some bracers for the back of the legs to hold everything in place. This would’ve had to have been done eventually as the complete unit would’ve been very unstable without them. I just didn’t think that I’d have to do it this early. Better planning, next time...
Finally, I decided that the top of the unit needing boxing off. It wasn’t totally necessary to do so but I just wanted to make the unit look a bit more polished. A few pieces of tongue and groove drilled and screwed in place and I was done.
This project could easily be adapted to suit any garden space you have and also altered to have more shelves, depending on the use. It was a fun thing to build and took me a little over a couple of hours to complete. Maybe next time I will make some smaller versions like the one that inspired me.