Sharon, I don’t know if customers ever ask what our containers are made of or how we arrived at the sizes and materials we use, but I thought I’d fill in a bit of background in case anybody is curious.
We use nursery trade containers, which are made from poly resin to be lightweight but strong enough to hold their shape and be re-used if the customer desires. They can also easily be cut away with garden shears or even household scissors for customers not wanting to pry the plant out of the container.
As to sizing, we match the size of the plant and its root system to the size of the container. The idea is to use the smallest possible container appropriate for that plant, so we don’t have to charge an arm and a leg for shipping. I know I don’t have to tell you, Sharon, how much gardeners hate paying those shipping fees, and I don’t blame them. Soil is heavy, and another reason we use the light poly resin pots when ever we can is that they weigh almost nothing, and can be stacked in the garage or wherever without taking up much space.
I know people complain about plastic, but to an old-timer like me, it’s a godsend. Now for putting it in the garden or on the deck, I still prefer terracotta and pottery, even though it breaks, just because I don’t think anything looks as good or breathes as well. But as a nurseryman, these poly resin blends are nothing short of a miracle. When I first got into the nursery business in the early 1950s in California, things were just getting started in terms of being able to ship plants in pots. Refrigerated trucking had come into being a while back, and the interstate highways were being laid out everywhere you looked. These two factors opened up a whole new world to wholesale plant growers. Suddenly you weren’t limited to seeds, bulbs, and dormant plants — you could send a potted tree clear across the country if you wanted!
Now, many of the early efforts to mail potted plants were dismal failures because the plants had been grown in greenhouses. The minute they hit real air, let alone a stuffy old truck for 5 to 8 days, they began to stress. So in the 50′s we looked long and hard at growing plants in containers in the field. It sounds like such a simple idea now, but it was brand new then. And in California, we were among the first to be able to do it, because of our year-round mild climate. Field-grown plants were much, much hardier than most greenhouse ones, and they could grow big old root systems right in the pot they would ship in. Hallelujah!
Of course, we didn’t have these nifty poly resin jobbies then. Our first pots were nothing more than a grown-up version of the coffee can, which every gardener in America used from the minute the coffee can was invented. We needed something bigger, so we went around to the schools, restaurants, and even a local prison and salvaged empty cans of pudding, vegetables, and yes, coffee by the hundred pound. Of course this is long before "recycling" with a capital R, but all of us had been through the Depression and the War, so we knew how to turn a worn-out tire into elastic for our britches. Digging through trash to liberate some giant metal cans was nothing. Matter of fact, I loved it, because you’d always find something unexpected. The things those places would throw out — reams of paper where just the top few sheets were dirty; whole flats of lettuce that only had a couple of rotten heads; etc., etc. Once I found a whole case of red lightbulbs, only one broken.
But I’m getting off track. Anyway, I used to put old worn out socks over my hands to try to cut back on the number of cuts you’d get grabbing the cut off edges of those cans. They’d slice right through our cloth and rubber gloves, and we couldn’t afford new pairs of those every week.
So we’d hose out those cans, jab a couple holes in the bottom, fill them up and plant them out, and they were just the ticket for growing shrubs and trees. Of course, they weighed a ton — we’d always load them into the truck for shipping before we watered them, so they wouldn’t be quite so heavy. But loading those cans was the worst part of the job. We had to put down a tarp on the floor of the truck to catch all the dirt and water, but then we’d slip and slide all over the place as we loaded in the cans. If you felt yourself falling, you were afraid to reach out and grab anything, because of all those sharp edges. But all in all, it was a revolutionary new way to grow and sell plants, and pretty exciting for the time.
Well, I let myself run on a bit here, but I thought some of you younger folks might be interested in how we got from there to here in terms of packaging! So you can see why blow-molded plastic pots are such a treat to me.
Over and out,
Eb