I was looking for an idea for garden markers for my vegetable garden. I wanted them to be on the large side and I wanted to be able to recreate them easily for future garden items. I was going to use wooden spoons and decorate them, but that wasn't very cost effective and it would take a lot of spoons for the size of garden that I am working on. I am trying to feed the family with fruit and vegetables that we've grown ourselves.
I was wandering around the isles of my local hardware store looking for scrap wood and I found the perfect solution! Wooden Shims! Now I thought that I was being very creative and thoughtful until I read the package....apparently the shim company had the same idea.
I painted the shims about 3/4 of the way down and left the skinny shim part paint free, because I don't want the paint to contaminate my soil. I had to use several coats of acrylic paint to make the bright colors pop and have less of the wood show through. I chose pretty bright colors to plop some nice color into my garden.
Two bright colors later and about three coats of paint this is what I created. This took a small bottle of acrylic paint for each color and I painted about fifteen shims with each one.
I used black acrylic paint and painted the markers with my current and future crops that are in the works. I just used a skinny brush and free handed the letters. After everything dried for several hours I sealed the painted areas with acrylic sealer, so that they would last through at least one season and not peel and flake all over the place.
I can say that they are a success so far. It has been very rainy here for the past few days and all of my markers are still in tact. Here is the final product of my garden marker project.
If you want to recreate this idea, you can use bright colors like I did, or just keep the wood plain and paint the letters on. I would suggest that if you keep the wood raw looking that you should still seal it, because it will warp and the letters could peel off otherwise. If I would have had them on hand I would have used paint stirrers instead, but my store would not give me any for free since I wasn't buying any paint from them.
Thanks for reading! Now go create something for yourself!
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