How to make a recycled Garden Hod -tutorial

Okay, so I admit it right here and now that I am not a carpenter. I never said I was one. I have zero carpentry skills. I usually have the guys at Lowes cut my wood for me when I have a project. Sad, I know. But I have scrap wood and power tools that are MINE. Which means idle hands get to mess around and make kinda crappy looking wooden things. This makes me happy, I won't apologize.

I made a table out of mdf once. It rapidly fell over. I've gotten much better*. I promise.

Today, I took about twenty minutes and I made myself a garden hod. I saw one in the Lehman's catalog and it's very pretty. And too expensive for me when I harvest about 3.4621 ounces of stuff a day. I love Lehman's but there are a couple nice ones up on Etsy right now that I urge you to check out if you must buy one. Support Handmade!

There is one pretty tutorial on how to make these particularly useful garden baskets but it requires more skills than I have and I have to buy materials and/or make fancy wood cuts. If you want to make a pretty one, go ahead. Go, I'm not stopping you.

For those of you that stayed, we're making a hod with straight lines and spare parts that I really didn't even have to cut. I used my cordless circular saw a total of once. We're that kinda scrappy and simple over here.

First gather up all the scrap wood you have laying around and stick it in a relatively neat pile along with all the tools you need. I have a power drill, power circular saw, a power screw hole maker (I told you I'm not a carpenter), a recycled formula container of scews and not pictured, a ruler and a colored pencil stolen from Alex's homeschool desk.

Line up your wood to make sure they're all relatively the same length. Looks familiar, huh? These are all the scrap pieces from filling in the pallets for the deck. These will be the bottom and sides of the hod.

Cut one piece of wood into two equal pieces, like below. Here is where that one saw cut came in. I think it was about 8". These will be the ends of the hod.

Line up your first piece of wood along the bottom of one side on a short end of the end cap piece. Predrill a hole all the way through into the side board with the power screw hole maker thing.

Do this all the way around. Attaching first one side then marking with the ruler and pencil on the other to make sure the side spaces are mostly accurately spaced. The bottom spaces are going to be less wide than the sides but still wide enough that you can use the basket as a seive, to rinse off dirt and debris from your harvest.

Finish up the other side.

Then attach a handle to the top. I looked around for a fallen tree limb to make it even more recycled but all the wood around here is too rotten and I didn't like cutting off a new limb from a healthy tree. I left space on the sides to get in larger items and I still have to go over the edges to smooth them out so I don't hurt myself on it.

 Here is the finished Hod!

Here it is with the harvest from today!

Have fun harvesting!

*"much better" is a relative term meaning now I over do stuff so much that it will not ever fall apart. Though it might not be even, straight or plumb (I do know what that means.)