Garden Planters: Bring the garden indoors, or explore container gardening on your patio

~ Potting and Repotting Planters~

Soil must give the plant nutrients and hold it in place in the planters.  There are a couple of different types of soil mixtures that will work well in your planters.  You can add nutrients to your soil in the form of plant food, but the soil itself does need to be renewed.

Soil for the planter must allow for adequate drainage.  This is more important than the nutrients in the soil.  A soil with good drainage should also allow for lots of air to reach the roots of the plants.  To meet both of these ends a soil should consist of coarser particles.

You can create your own soil mixture for the planters.  The following is a list of ingredients for your garden planter’s soil.

• Sand
• Leaf mold, humus or peat moss
• Bone meal or manure
• And good garden soil as the base

Mix these ingredients together well, and you should have a soil for your plants that will provide lots of nutrients, as well as fulfilling the drainage and aeration needs of the plants roots.  You can soak the leaf mold, humus or peat moss in water overnight and squeeze out just before adding to soil mixture.

Repotting Plants

You should typically re-pot young plants as their roots become overcrowded in their current pots.  This means that the plant’s soil has run out of nutrients and probably needs to be replaced anyway.

However if you like you can try to keep the plant healthy by ‘top dressing’ the soil in the existing pot.  Simply put, you replace the loose soil in the pot or planter with a newer nutrient rich soil mix.  Afterward you should give the plant regular doses of plant food with lots of nutrients in it.  This won’t always work, if there is no loose soil to replace then you need to go to a larger pot.

When going to a new pot you need to make sure it is clean.  Scrub it out with soap, water and a little bleach.  Let the pot dry out for about two days then you can treat it like new.  You don’t have to move up to a much larger size pot for your new plant, about one inch larger in diameter should be fine for your plant. 

Before you transplant a plant to a new pot you should water it thoroughly a few hours beforehand, but don’t water immediately before or the soil will be too wet to handle.

A handy tip for getting your plant out of its pot is to tip it over and tap the edge firmly against a solid surface.

Be sure to put your drainage material in the bottom of the new pot and you can place a layer of soil on top of this to bring the plant ball up to about midway up the pot.  It can’t be set too low or too high, or the roots of the plant won’t be able to grow properly.  Once the plant is placed fill in the empty space around it with soil. This can be tamped down lightly with a wooden rod or lath.  Once the plant is settled in water the plant again. 

This process is about the same when replanting in a garden planter, except when you dig out the plants you will end up losing some root material.  So you will need to trim down the top of the plants foliage in order to balance the root system with the foliage of the plant.