Pots and Pots of Pots

When we moved to Springfield nine years ago, Doc was unhappy about packing several boxes of plastic plant pots to bring with us.  The removal men didn’t look much happier.  When we arrived and started to unpack, they found a coal bunker under a large rhodendron.  Doc thought it would be a useful, albeit temporary, home for the plant pots.  However, when he fought his way into the bunker, it was full – of plant pots left behind by the previous owners!  He was ready to send the removal men off to the council tip but since the plant pots were brand new and square (a very economical use of space on greenhouse staging!) I insisted we add them to our already large collection.  I have still only managed to use a quarter of them.

Every gardener knows that plant pots breed at an alarming rate and that is because we encourage them.  We buy a plant in a snazzy pink pot and think that the pot will be very useful in the future, when we find something to put in it, which of course we never do.  We are told to be thrifty and re-cycle everything in the garden but the trouble is you cannot put plant pots on the compost heap.  They gather spiders in the shed, the greenhouse and of course, our coal bunker.  They are definitely not an endangered species.

So this year was the year of the plant pot cull because we had reached the point when something had to be done.  I tipped out the small flimsies that come from the garden centre and there were several stacks of pots which were cracked, bent or chipped.  The tall thin pots which are home to young clematis were also sent to the great pot cemetery as were those shallow pots that don’t allow for any root growth. 

The large bucket size pots were much too valuable to throw away.  I use those to line decorative terracotta pots because this cuts down on the watering I have to do.  Clay pots are very nostalgic so I arranged those on a shelf in the shed - not that I use them very much because they are small and need frequent watering.  (I suppose I keep them because they represent the sort of gardener I would like to be, with a dainty collection of auriculars and a theatre on which to display them.  This is a fantasy of course because I don’t have time to potter with such frivolities.  There are veggies to grow for dinner!)

Doc asked me if I had washed any of the pots and I am afraid this task never reaches the top of priorities.  If we had the equivalent of a dishwasher in the shed, I might consider it but life is too busy on the plot for such chores and I don’t have a ‘pot boy or girl’ to help me.  If a pot is infested with greenfly I swill it out with water and put it into quarantine - in a pot behind the greenhouse.  Should there be anything remotely resembling a vine weevil in a pot, I put it in the dustbin.  However, I do often leave pots to sunbathe on the edges of the raised beds.  I don’t know if the heat treatment kills beasties and nasties, but this is my theory anyway.
 
I did a couple of hours volunteering at a local special school yesterday and our leader suggested that it would be very useful if we could tidy up their boxes of pots and throw out the broken ones......  All I can say is that tidying pots in the polytunnel was preferable to working outside in the cold and at least I was recently practised at the task.  She also suggested that maybe we could label the shelves with the sizes of pots so the children could learn about volumes.  Oh dear, I was a bit rusty on how to ‘size’ a pot.  I can identify a litre pot but that’s about it.  I tend to pick one up which looks right, don’t you?  In the end, we agreed that the labels were best left as small, medium and large.....

Despite Doc’s chuntering about the State Of The Pots, he has come up with a very useful way of up-cycling plant pots.  When he planted the new damson tree he had forgotten to buy a plant guard to keep the rabbits off the bark.  He very cleverly removed the bottom of a tall plant pot, trimmed the plastic and then curled it round into a collar which fits perfectly around the tree.   Secured with plastic wire, it cost us nothing and seems to be working. 

Doc has produced a range of sizes and is looking around the garden for other trees and shrubs which may need protection.  However, I doubt we need 436 tree collars, which is probably the number of pots in our shed, greenhouse and coal bunker.  My cull was not as effective as the tree collar.