Succulent Siding

I warned you Friday that Chris and I had some big weekend goals, and after a busy weekend, I'd say we accomplished one out of the two, and we're pretty happy with it. I wrote months ago about wanting to build some gutter planters on our garage, and we finally got around to getting this done.

The project was a bit more involved than I thought it would be (aren't they all?), so it ended up taking pretty much all day Saturday. It was a beautiful day though, and we spent the majority of it working in the shade of our big walnut tree out back, so no complaints here!

After drawing up plans and measurements last week, I purchased four 10' aluminum gutters, 24 hangers, eight end pieces, a rivet gun and rivets and some black spray paint. We cut the gutters down to size with a hack saw (taking turns and wearing ear plugs - it sounded terrible!)

Then we drilled drainage holes, painted them black and attached the end pieces with a rivet gun. Once that was finished, we took them to the backyard and set them up in the grass to make sure one last time that we liked our design. We did, so it was time to start hanging them up. 

Here's the wall before planters: 

We left the shepherd's hook up for now - it used to hold a bird feeder which I since moved into a flower bed near the fence. I think I'll probably move it to the back of the garage one of these days (maybe near my new garden tool hanger) and put a nice big wind chime on it.

Anyway, here's the garage with planter #1:

and a second:

then #3:

and the last one:

All up! This actually took some doing, as we knew these planters would be fairly heavy once they're full. We attached a heavy duty bracket at each stud that each planter crossed - 22 brackets all together!

After that, it was time to fill them up! I filled the bottom fourth of each planter with pea gravel to facilitate drainage, then filled the rest with one part sand and two parts soil, all mixed together.

 Finally, the fun part came. I purchased a few plants to get me started this year - all perennial succulents. I specifically looked for plants that can deal with hot, dry summers and survive through cold winters (mostly rated for zone three of four through zone nine), since they're in a metal planter rather than the ground so are likely to feel both heat and cold a bit more. In addition, succulents need much less water than most other plants, which means I won't be drenching the side of our garage every day to keep them alive. 

It's hard not to go crazy and fill the the planters full right now, but I'm pacing myself to see how these guys do this winter. I'll probably add a few more plants here and there throughout the fall, but I want to make sure these varieties will come back well after the winter before I completely fill them. My hope is that they'll all be thriving and spreading next spring, at which point I will add more until the garage looks like a big, green living wall!

As for the weekend project we didn't get to, we're still plugging along with our house painting project. So far we're about halfway done - through with the back (east side) and finished except for some trim work with the north side, which we hoped to work on this weekend but ran out of time. This week and next weekend we want to get the north side completely finished. Then CJ will start sanding the south side, while I work on painting the porch ceiling and trim. Our hope is by winter to have only the upper story of the front of the house left to do - which we will wrap up next spring. This story to be continued . . . . .