bricks

we're not so lucky here in the Philippines to have good materials in making ceramic pots..it is sooo expensive here...so most of the local pots here are made of concrete like the pots am using on my trees...its bit heavy but durable.and less expensive too..i attached some pics on how we made concrete pots here...

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JLDoggett

Very interesting, can you give details on the material mix used to make them? While they would not be good for acid loving trees, I wonder how they would be for lime-loving trees?

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bricks

hi...
materials are composed of fine sand, cement, and water..am not really sure about acid and lime technically but almost all of our trees here were using concrete pots,very seldom i saw some trees elegently sitting on imported pots maybe because its too expensive here..

before painting the concrete pots we used to apply concrete neutralizer to treat the mortar.this helps neutralize lime, acid and alkaline activity on fresh concrete...then sealed it with elastomeric water based paints...for large pemphis trees (as shown on my new attachments) we need definitely strong and durable pots.so using these concrete pots is a plus

bricks

these are heavy trees using concrete pots

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Phil

All I can say is fascinating! I'm not referring to the trees albeit they are obviously beautiful to say the least. I've never heard of these concrete pots although I can easily see how they would be quite cheap to produce and also considering how the lime is neutralized. Any idea how these pots hold up under time?

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bricks

hi phil.
if you mean durability-well i guess it really depends on the right mixture of the concrete and also the screen/ mattings we use to insulate the pots and avoid the cracks..it last same as the ceramics-but needs to repaint it from time to time same as we did on normal concrete walls- to avoid algaes and moss growth on the pots...using rubberized water based or elastomeric paints are better to protects the surface from everyday watering of the trees...also these concrete pots are much easy to repair from small accidental bumps...i saw some article on the net i think from russia where theyre making concrete pots too but instead using scrap papers rather than sand.said it less on weight,am looking again for that article but unfortunately lost the link...hopefully try that one too...