Historical cost of plant pots
Posted: April 17th, 2022, 11:52 am
Sitting at the intersection of gardening and finance does anybody have an idea what 50 1L plant pots delivered to your door would have set you back in the days of clay?
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bungeejumper wrote:No idea, plastic pots were invented in the 1940s and were big sellers by 1960. How far back to you want/need to go?
(An interesting historical link at https://journals.ashs.org/downloadpdf/j ... le-p28.pdf , BTW)
I have a number of head gardeners in my genealogy, mostly working at grand country houses. I believe the usual practice was to send the boy down to the railway station with a hand cart.
But enough of such frivolity. Can you imagine what the ancient Romans must have said when they invaded Gaul with all those clumsy great amphorae, only to discover that the Celts had been using lightweight wooden barrels for centuries?
BJ
BobbyD wrote:Having just had 50 of those very thin, flexible but so far surpringly tough pots delivered ro my door for a little over a tenner it got me wondering what the equivalent would have cost when they were thicker, heavier, more fragile and required firing. I can't believe there isn't a decent saving in distribution alone, let alone manufacturing.
bungeejumper wrote:Oh, I do agree. The old pots would have cost a fortune, especially by the standards of half a century ago. They used heavy and hard-won materials, they weighed a ton, they were susceptible to picking up moulds and diseases - and after all that, they would crack in a frost, or if the plant's roots got too big. (Ours still do break, but I glue them back together with epoxy. ) I'd doubt whether many of the old pots lasted more than ten years. But don't they look so much nicer?
Having said that, modern materials are much more efficient for growing plants. The link I gave earlier describes how American researchers in the 1940s were impressed at how well plants fared when grown in old tin cans, as distinct from clay pots, where the roots developed more slowly - and it details how this eventually led to the push for plastic pots.
Personally, I use old half-litre yoghurt pots to grow plants on these days - I just drill a drainage hole at the bottom, and they'll probably be good for twenty years. Now all I have to do is figure out a way of recycling our pile of maybe 300 black plastic pots from the garden centre, which no waste recycler seems to want because the optical sorting machines can't work with black plastic. Harrumph, you'd have thought they'd have got that issue sorted by now, wouldn't you?
BJ
PS: O/T, I know, but I'm a firm convert to deep root trainers such as https://www.haxnicks.co.uk/products/deep-rootrainer . Thirteen quid for 32 plugs seems like a lot, but they last five years and more, and nothing gets deep-rooted plants off to such a good start. My beans, sweet peas and sweetcorn are roaring away, as usual.