Hi! I’m David Epstein, this is Growing Wisdom.
And you know clay pots are really wonderful. And there’s a lot of new pots out there. But there is something still I really like about using clay pots around the house.
One of the problems of the clay pot is that the water evaporates really quickly out of these. It is the same problem for hanging baskets as well because they are surrounded by air, the soil is not too deep, and the water tends to evaporate so you have to water a hanging basket once or twice a day, sometimes during the hottest weather. And this cannot only be an inconvenient, it could something that if you forget, your hanging basket ends up dead.
So, I want to show you a quick little solution. So, here’s your clay pot. And what we are going for is something that looks like this. This is just some impatiens in a pot. And I have not watered this in over a week. This made it through three days of 90 degree weather and one day of a hundred degree weather, no problem at all. Why? Well, let’s talk about it.
We’re going to use typical potting soil in this particular clay pot. However, the difference is I’m going to use a polymer that absorbs water and holds the water so that if I don’t get to water this to one, two, three, four days, the polymer will continue to release the water and that will keep the plant happy and alive.
First thing you want to do is you want to take the pot and you can put a stone or an old broken pot in the bottom because what you want to do is you want to make sure that the hole doesn’t have the soil dripping out of it. And we’re going to mix in a polymer into the soil. See these little white crystals here? Those are the polymers prior to getting watered. And this is what happens to it after it gets watered. See, it turns into this gel? Well, that gel is what is going to release the water into the plant.
But the important thing I want you to notice is how much bigger this is. This is multiple times, 25 times at least as big, wet, as it is dry. So, you want to be very careful not to mix too much of these in or it will literally push itself right out of the pot, you’ll overflow the pot. So, I’ve taken this pot and we’ve put in a little bit of garden soil in here. And according to the directions, this size pot gets about three quarters of a teaspoon and that is it. So, we are mixing that in. And notice I did not fill the pot up. If you fill it up to the top, the crystals will also be at the top. I want the crystals down in the root zone.
Then what I can do is I can plant the impatiens and then I can fill the rest of the top up with the soil. I’ve also left a little bit of room at the top of the pot because as the polymer expands, it’s going to push the soil up a little bit. So, if you would have this to the top, it will push the plant right out of pot. We‘re going to go and place that over in the bench, close out the segment and you know what we say, come back every week for all of our tips, hints, and helps at growingwisdom.com.
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