DIY TIERED STRAWBERRY VERTICAL PLANTER BOX FOR YOUR This strawberry planter is a perfect DIY project for growing strawberries in vertical tiers. It serves as a raised strawberry bed with 3 tiers of box planters – great for small space gardening.

Don’t forget to download this project’s cutting guide at the end of the post, to get the exact measurement I used for this project, for maximize the material usage with a budget.

Strawberries are one of the best fruits to grow in a compact space

Strawberries are probably one of the best fruits you can grow in a small space! It is just so beginner friendly. Strawberry plants are so easy to take care of, and will reward you with lots of strawberries throughout the summer as long as you keep the water coming. It is also small space friendly because of the compact plant size. If you only got a patio but want to grow edibles, strawberry is the way to go!

If you are thinking about growing strawberries, it is definitely worth spending some time to think about what is the best planter to grow strawberry – especially if you are constrained with space.

What is the best planter for strawberries?

To produce a lot of delicious strawberries, you’ll need to plant many plants. This is due to the nature of how strawberries are formed on the plants and the small size of the plants. So that means, traditionally growing strawberries can take a lot of horizontal space.

So it is best to grow strawberry plants vertically. Because of that, I see a lot of people use vertical strawberry planters, such as this stackable planter, and this ceramic planter.

But you can probably tell those commercial strawberry pots are not very cheap, and they can be hard to set up irrigation system around them. Also they are not the prettiest planter. Because we want to grow strawberries in our backyard, we would like the strawberry planter to look more permanent and blend in better with our backyard landscaping, such as some wooden planters.

Growing strawberries in vertical tiers

A couple months ago I discovered a 3 tier planter box plan from Ana White‘s website. And I thought: a tiered planter will be so perfect for planting strawberries! The planter box can be shallow and wide so that we can pack so many plants inside. Also because each tier is staggered, it would maximize the sunlight received.  My husband and I were so excited and ended up building this out on a weekend!

We’ve already gained some experience on building garden stuff from the $5 DIY trellis tutorial project, so this DIY strawberry planter is a great opportunity to take our skill to the next level.

This is what this DIY tiered planter looked like in early March, when strawberries just started forming

This is during mid April, that you can already pick up some ripe strawberries. In my experience, strawberry is a very satisfying plant to grow as it produce fruits quite fast, and always taste delicious – so much better than those ones from the store

DIY tiered strawberry planter dimension and materials

STRAWBERRY PLANTER FINISHED DIMENSIONS

The finished strawberry planter is 34.5″ wide and 23″ tall, with each planter box 30″W x 7″D x 5.5″H. There’s 2″ gap between each planter box.

We put around 10 strawberry plants in each planter box, so around 30 plants for the entire tiered planter.

We have found it is a pretty good spacing for us. It allows us to have many plants to maximize fruit production, without being over crowded.

TOOLS

2″ screws (make sure to buy exterior grade screws)

Brad nails (exterior grade)

Brad nailer

Clamps

WOOD BOARDS

For the wood boards, we got some interior/exterior grade boards from our local Home Depot: 1″ x 6″ board for the 3 box tiers, and some 2″ x 4″ board for the post. The size and amount of boards was based on:

1. what size of boards are available in the store.

2. What size of each planter box should be. This step helps to maximize the usage of each board, thus reduce the material cost.

The total wood board cost is around $30. considering how many strawberry plants we can tuck in there, it is a pretty good deal. We ended up plant ~30 strawberry plants there, 10 per tier.

DIY STRAWBERRY PLANTER CUTTING GUIDE

Want to get the exact measurement of what I used for this DIY strawberry planter project? Download this FREE cutting guide

Tiered strawberry planter DIY instructions

The process was pretty straight forward, we followed the plan from Anna White’s website for the most part, but modified the dimension to reduce material cost and make it optimal for growing strawberries. We also tweaked the DIY process a bit.

So the end result is longer but shallower planter boxes – A perfect DIY tiered planter for growing strawberries!

Here are our steps:

Step 1. Cut materials

First, we cut the boards based to size based on our calculation. Although we modified the size for the planter boxes, we did use the same measurement of supporting legs from the plan, except we upgraded to 2″ x 4″ boards for sturdiness.

Then we drilled some holes off the bottom piece of each planter box to make sure water can drain. I did 5 holes per planter box.

Step 2. Assembling

Next assembling it. To make sure it is super sturdy, we first used exterior grade wood glue to stick those boards together. Then we used brad nails (also exterior grade) to secure them in place. To finish it off, we screw some 2″ exterior screws close to the end of each sides.

After all the boxes were assembled, it is time to add the legs to connect all three tiers together.

We attached the supporting legs with 2″ screws, starting from the top one, following the instruction here.

Bar clamps always come in handy when I screw things together.

How to protect wooden strawberry planter?

Once you finish building this wooden strawberry planter, it is time to think about whether you want to seal the wood or not. DIY Tiered Strawberry Planter

Because the board we used is interior/exterior grade, we didn’t bother with sealing the surface. After a whole season of rains, this strawberry planter did start to put on a weathered look. The wood color will turn gray, with some spots darker than the other. Box for Your

It is still very sturdy, and we have been using it for two seasons already without any issue.

So this is a personal preference! If you like a very new look and is not a big fan of rustic style, you might want to seal the wood to reserve the color.

If you are interested in more budget friendly garden DIY projects, check out the posts linked right below.