This was a fun little afternoon project to get these ponytail palms I was gifted into their forever homes.
By far my favorite plant/tree is the ponytail palm. So when I found these 2 specimens while I was on the road one day and was able to
take them home with me, I was in love. They deserved not only to be given googly eye attachments, but to also become the mascots for my
newly built Spa / BBQ area.
They were given nicknames of Overlord and Beaker respectively, although as of this morning after a few days of rain and steamy weather,
Overlord decided to grow himself an umbrella! He might be pushing for a name change to Totoro...
I generally find Overlord/Totoro looking over to his right maintaining order and watching over the spa.
While Beaker is constantly judging my cooking on the BBQ looking down from his elevated position.
I found these nice suitable pots at Bunnings to re-pot the palms into. But I still needed a way to display them in all their glory. Out came the welder and a handful of steel to make some brackets, so I could mount them to the post.
I bent up some mild steel flat bar into a circle with a radius to match the bottom of the new pots.
Then cut some pieces to support the bottom and welded it all together.
With a few more random pieces of steel I had lying around, I cut and welded together the bracket that I will use to attach it to the post. Then a quick spray paint in the same colourbond colour as the adjacent fence.
When it came to mounting them to the support post, there may have been a slight bit of over engineering involved. I wanted to allow for enough weight placed on these brackets that I didn’t have to worry at all about the palms growing too big and becoming too heavy. I also didn’t want to nut and bolt them right through the post, as it would have looked ugly on the back side. So I chose 4x M8 Stainless Steel security bolts drilled and tapped into the post.
