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Hello gardening friends, welcome to Backyard Basics.
You ever fooled with a strawberry pot trying to grow some strawberries in it or
some other kind of plant? They're real easy to do actually and they
are a lot of fun. They get a lot of plant material,
some people get herbs in them. You can really get an assortment of herbs
growing on the porch at home. When you have limited space this is a real
neat thing to be doing. And so some of these strawberry pots are quite
large and others are, oh, about this size.
What I like to look for is a nice big lip when I'm working with them,
because some of them are so small you came hardy get a plant in there.
And when you're planting, one of the things that I like to put in all
of the pots that I'm planting up on that hole in the bottom
is a piece of screen like this. You can see that this is a plastic screen
right here and the reason I put it over the hole is so
that peel bugs don't move in there or roaches or worst yet, fire ants!
Gosh, once those fire ants get in here they'll a little bit hard to manage
you don't see them and you take them in the house and that's a problem.
So you can literally keep all of these types of insects out of there
when you place one of these screens down over the hole in the bottom of the pot.
It's a real good thing to do. You don't need that shard down there;
it won't keep anything out. It does keep the soil from washing out
but so does the screen and keep the insects out.
So I always use a screen when I'm planting these things up.
You always want a good potting soil too. You never put dirt in pots.
It just kind of clogs up the whole system and doesn't work very well.
So a nice potting soil is really critical; one that drains well,
one that has some good organic matter in it. I like a little compost in my potting soils
because compost brings life to the growing medium no matter where you use it,
in the yard or in a container like this. So, I'll put a little bit of this growing
medium down in the bottom. Now, watering these things is always a challenge.
Look at this right here, this is where a put this plant in, this portulaca,
it gives us a lot of summer color-- and the way to do that--there's two ways of
doing it. Now this plant is really nice and large
so it is difficult to bring it in, in the traditional way,
to bring the plant up like this and keep the root ball in there.
So I take a little bit of the soil off of it
and then I'll just go ahead and stuff it down in there,
making sure that some of the soil or plenty of the soil goes down into the container itself,
so I've got soil coming down out here. You can see that this is going to hard to
water evenly, so we put that in there.
So to make watering a lot easier there's a couple of things you can do,
especially to get the water down in the bottom because when there is plants in the top it's
much more challenging. I like to recycle all the time
and in the bigger containers the way to get the water down
in the bottom is to go ahead and put a container like this in there.
What I do is I put some small holes in the bottom
and a little bit of a larger hole right here. So, we put that down in there;
I put gravel in; it slows the water from moving out too quickly
and spreads it out a little more evenly. And I make sure that the top is riding high
in the container right here. Then we put the soil in around it
and then you can water through here and water comes out the bottom of it.
One of the more classic ways of doing this in,
really any kind of a container especially big ones is to get a PVC pipe.
Now, you put a cap on the end of it and then you make some small holes right here.
These small holes allow the water to come out more slowly
and as I go up the tube I put some bigger ones in there.
That way the water is disturbed evenly when your putting it in there,
making sure that the top gets the water it needs and so does the bottom.
Once again, we put a little bit of gravel in there;
this helps distribute the water a little bit more evenly
and slows it down. This goes into the container like this,
with the top raised up a little bit and then we can water in there much more easily.
So, you distribute the water evenly throughout the container when you do this.
Some of the pots actually are not ceramic and they dry out very, very quickly.
So, doing this is a real important way to keep the water evenly distributed,
otherwise its a little bit more challenging. Look at this container right here.
Now succulents really don't need a lot of water,
but once again getting it down to the bottom is a little more challenging.
So this does have the pot right in there, the opening,
and I go in there and fill this with water and it last many, many days without having
to be refilled. So if you want to save a little water
and get it into these containers more evenly, try some of these ideas.
You'll see that it's a lot more efficient than other ways of watering.
For Backyard Basics I'm John Dromgoole. I'll see you next week.