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Pots are a nice addition to any landscape and we try incorporate them into all our landscape designs. Today we are going to show you how to correctly plant a pot as well as add irrigation and drainage. These photos are from a job we recently did in Faria Beach, which is on PCH between Ventura and Santa Barbara, near Carpinteria. There are three things you’ll want to plan for if you are placing your pot in a new or remodeled landscape. First, if you are placing your pot on a new hardscape such as concrete, flagstone, or pavers, you will want to place a drainage catch basin beneath each of your pots. Otherwise you will have dirty water stains on your new hardscape. You won’t need to worry about this on a redwood or Trex deck as there is normally a gap between the boards where water can easily drain down. The second important thing to plan for with a new surface is irrigation. On a new hardscape you’ll want to stub out a PVC pipe underneath or behind each pot location. On a new or existing deck you’ll want to plan on drilling a hole for the PVC feed, preferably with a hole saw for a clean cut. The last aspect to plan for in larger pots is a low-voltage lighting feed. Up lighting in pots can have a dramatic effect and is relatively easily. Much like your irrigation feed, install a PVC or electrical conduit stub out underneath or behind your pot. You can run the wire now, which makes it very easy to install. If you plan on running wiring later, make sure to use sweeps on your turns so that the wire will be easy to pull.

Once you have your drainage, sprinkler, and lighting feeds taken of, it’s time to place your pot. Its good practice to place some kind of pot feet underneath, as this helps to promote good drainage. Pot feet can sometimes be purchased in the same color and material as the pot itself as you see above, otherwise you can just use pieces of wood or plastic because many times it can’t be seen from the landscape. Make sure at this point that your pot is aligned, secure and level because once the soil is in you won’t be able to easily move it.

Once your pot is in its final resting place, install a 1″-2″ layer of crushed rock or gravel in the bottom of the pot and cover it with weedcloth. This is a very important step in preparing your pot to support a healthy plant. Without good drainage, your plant’s health will suffer. Make sure you install the weedcloth as well, as this helps to keep the gravel or crushed clean and free draining.

If you are running your irrigation and lighting feeds through your pot, make sure you run them up into the pot at this point and up above the soil line. For this pot, I ran PVC into the point and then converted to drip and ran the drip up the side of the pot away from the rootball of the plant. This was a low pressure feed, with a pressure regulator and wye filter at the valve.

Now we can begin filling our pot with potting soil and our plants. Make sure to use potting soil because its specifically formulated for pots and does not require any mixing. This pot was in full shade so we chose a large Tubidanthus in the middle, with Clivia, Liriope, and Impatiens around it.

Now that my plants are in place, I ran the drip line along the inner edge of the pot.

I then added 5 drip risers with 180 degree emitters on them. These emitters have flow control knobs on the top which make them easy to get just the right amount of flow and throw.

And that is a successful pot install. For any questions or comments on this, please Contact Us.