Whether you are in the northern hemisphere with snow or rain in the weather forecast or in Australia with where spring rains are encouraging blossoms and new growth, one thing every gardener knows is that October is a season of change. Seasonal changes involve either moving plants out of protected areas and planting or bringing plants into protected areas and harvesting.
GRC Pots Make Your Work Easier
GRC pots, or pots made of glass reinforced concrete, make the seasonal changes much easier to manage. They are available in a variety of sizes and shapes, are tough, light to move, and are ecologically friendly. Those are all words that any gardener likes to hear. In addition, if you are dealing with designer trees, whether you are encouraging sprouts that will be planted out in a different season or whether you are slowly training that lovely olive tree bonsai, your choice of pot can make your work easier.
How GRC Helps You
GRC pots are made by adding glass fibers to concrete. The long fibers strengthen the concrete while making it lighter to move about. This means that you can move a large pot with only one or two people instead of requiring a forklift for getting the biggest pots from one place to another. If you have a personal garden or even if you are working in a greenhouse or similar setting sometimes you need to be able to manage shifting things around on your own. Even if the pot is loaded up with a specialized plant such as a Xanthorrhoea grass tree or a young Queensland bottle tree, it is still nice not to have the weight of a heavy pot increasing the load when you are shifting it from a protected area into a more open space.
Color in Your Garden
You can purchase GRC pots in an amazing array of colors, ranging from basic terra cotta to wildly flamboyant primary or secondary hues. The colors are added during the molding process, making it easy to select a color and have it created for you. More than that, GRC pots are molded. The molds can be created in all sorts of shapes and sizes from a basic terra cotta earthenware planter style to amazing designs that mimic elaborately created classical urns. This means that it is easy to use them to blend with a previously developed garden theme or to create a whole new concept for your outdoor spaces.
Shapes count
The shape of a pot can make the difference between a successful planting and an unsuccessful one. A young tree, such as a dragon tree or a mango, will do better in a deep pot than a shallow one. While they will still require a reasonable amount of width, they also need depth. Think of the pots in which Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves hid, and you will probably have a good idea about the shape of pot preferred by a growing young tree. On the other hand, if you are growing agave and you want to encourage the plant to grow pups, you might want a wide, shallow bowl-like pot. Not too shallow, of course, because you want room for roots. But the wide bowl provides space for the plant to stretch out rootlets that can grow into baby agave. If you are having trouble visualizing this, think of the plants often called hens and chicks. They have a central rosette shaped plant, and put out new growth all around themselves. Open ground encourages the “chicks” to grow.
Small Pots for New Plants
Although with GRC pots the focus is often on the big pots, you can also obtain smaller GRC pots. These are excellent for starting young trees from seed. For example, the Xanthorrhoea glauca grass tree can be grown from seed. Therefore, it is a good idea to start them in pots that have the traditional garden pot shape because they will allow the tree to be gently removed from a small pot without a lot of root disturbance. In such pots, it is easy to spoon in a little of the native soil that will have the mycorrhiza that is symbiotic with these glauca grass trees. You also have full control over other aspects of the planting medium, such as loam, drainage, and so on.
One of the nice things about GRC planting pots is that they have a beautifully smooth surface. This makes it easy to coax the baby trees out of their first home, and easy to scrub up the pots before planting in them again.
Overall, GRC facilitate making those essential seasonal changes. They are lightweight yet strong. Practical, but can be fanciful and decorative. They are available in super large sizes, but can be obtained in conveniently small sizes. They are an excellent innovation for modern gardening, landscaping, and plant enjoyment, both indoors and out.