Specialty Gardening: Benches for Pots, 1 by tapla

tapla wrote:
It's tough to get a good look at this because of the snow, but I built this arrangement to make it easier to care for bonsai & pre-bonsai plants in containers. I used 4x6 posts & 2x4's for the structure. The angle iron is 1-1/2 x 1-1/2. You wouldn't need the poly-planks, they're expensive. Instead, you could put 1x2's between the angles every 12-18", and then put wire fabric on the 1x2's.

The posts are 8' apart and the shelves are 16" wide. Total, I have 80'x16" of space to grow on.

If you intend to leave plants on the shelves all winter, they would need to be hardy to at least 2, maybe 3 zones colder than yours. Even in the dead of winter, the earth provides lots of radiant heat to containers that are on the ground. Raising them off the ground subtracts at least 1 zone, and that they're in containers subtracts about the same.

Al