Many times when you go to the greenhouse to purchase a houseplant it comes in a
container that's not all that good
looking.
And we really want something that is
going to add to the decor of the house. And so at the
same time, while we're in the greenhouse, we might
buy a fancy pot that looks like this. A
nice glazed container with no hole in the
bottom. Now,
the thing you want keep in mind is the
fact that planting a plant in a
container with out a hole
does not allow you to grow the
plant properly because you can't water
properly. If we do water, the water ends
up in the bottom of this pot right here,
stays there, keeps the soil too moist too
long, causing root problems, and your
plant will start to fail and die. So the thing
we want to do is take advantage of this
pot, that has holes in it, yet take advantage of this pot, which looks good. So we're
going to do a process called double potting.
And double potting means nothing more
than taking this plant, still in the pot,
putting it inside a decorative pot so we
hide the pot.
So we're going to do this by first filling
this container with something like pea
gravel, and the pea gravel is basically going to act as a reservoir for excess moisture.
We're going to put the pot in here,
and it's at about the same level the
decorative container is. Now, what this
allows you to do, is that when you water
this plant right here, the excess water
will come out the holes in the bottom,
end up in this reservoir pea gravel
in the bottom over here,
and you can then take this
container
and dump out the excess moisture
and the plant is going to maintain and
grow properly because the soil
isn't constantly being kept wet.
So this is the first step in double potting.
The second step is: What we do about this
rather unattractive top portion? Very
easily taken care of by taking something
called sphagnum moss, this is moist sphagnum moss,
and you do nothing more than just pack
the moist sphagnum moss bag around the top of
the container,
hiding the pot so that
you have something that looks attractive
yet can be maintained properly in the
home. So here we have a double potting situation which allows you to grow that
plant
properly
while still
looking good.