People pick up one of our black pots and turn it around in their hands. Then they ask about the spikes – “what is this crazy thing”?
It’s an Air Pruning Pot. The wall isn’t solid. It’s a ring of open cones. Water can leave through those holes instead of sitting in the bottom. When a root grows out to one of the openings, it stops and branches instead of circling the inside of the pot. You get a dense, healthy root ball instead of a tight spiral of roots that never want to leave the can.
That’s why we use them.
Why they fit south Louisiana
We grow in heat, humidity, and a lot of rain. A regular nursery pot holds water much longer than an Air Pot. After a storm, the soil can stay wet around the roots for a long time. Plumeria do not like wet feet. That’s how you get a cutting that feels firm at the top and squishy at the bottom and quite often you lose the cutting to root rot.
An Air Pot doesn’t make the plant rot-proof. It just lets extra water go much faster than a normal black nursery pot. The soil dries faster. In July through September we water more often because of that. Morning or evening, soil not leaves. The pot gets light, we water. It isn’t guesswork as much as paying attention.
We’ve had customers worry they’re watering “too much” compared with a plant in a black nursery pot. In an Air Pot, more frequent watering is normal. The pot is doing what it’s supposed to do by drying out much faster.
What air pruning actually looks like
When a root hits air at one of those cones on the Air Pot, the tip stops. The plant sends out more roots behind it. Over time you get a lot of finer roots instead of a few long ones plastered to the wall of the pot.
That’s useful when you take a plant home. It isn’t as root-bound. It settles into a new soil easier. We like that on a sale plant and we like it on a cutting we’re trying to root.
The Air Pot is a sheet plastic full of cones that laps over on one edge. We fasten it with zip ties. When it’s time to up pot a plant, we cut the ties, open the Air Pot, and lift the plant out. The sides come away. You’re not dumping and tugging the root ball out of a plastic pot, so the roots stay put and are not damaged.
How we use them here
Our cuttings go into 1.6 gallon Air Pots. Rooted plants stay in Air Pots up to 5 gallon and then we switch back to larger black nursery pots. Our plumeria we root to sell leave our nursery is in an Air Pot. That’s the whole program, not a special treatment for a few trees.
We also sell several size Air Pots at shows. If you want to grow the way we do, you can take the Air Pot home and use it on the next cutting or any other plant you’d like to move from a nursery pot to an Air Pot.
We stay organic with what we put in the soil – we like to say we feed the soil and the soil feeds the plumeria. Tru Organics granular and liquid, along with their rooting hormone is what we like to use when we’re starting cuttings. Slow, steady feeding. We’re not trying to push lanky growth so a plant flowers tomorrow. We’re trying to grow a plumeria that can stand through a Louisiana summer and mature at a normal pace.
What we’d tell you to do at home
If you take one of our plants:
- Expect the pot to dry faster than a regular can. That’s the design.
- Water when it’s light, early or late, on the soil not the leaves.
- Don’t sit it in a saucer of water. You just undid the drainage.
- Don’t assume more fertilizer will make up for a watering mistake.
- When you step up a size, cut the zip ties and open the pot. That’s the gentle way out.
If you’re potting a cutting of your own in an Air Pot, same idea. Let a fresh cut callous. Don’t bury a wet, rotted end. Some varieties — dark reds, purples, rainbows — take longer to root. Patience helps more than extra water.
This is what works on our cuttings, in our pots, in this climate. A greenhouse in a dry place, or a plant in the ground, is a different setup. That’s fine.
If you want to see an Air Pot in person, we’ll have them at Firefly Under the Moon on September 12 and at the Livingston Master Gardener sale on September 19. You can pick one up, look through the holes, and decide if it makes sense for your yard.
That’s really all it is. A pot that doesn’t hold a puddle, roots that don’t run in circles, and zip ties so we can open it without tearing up the plant.