Blog

The poinsettia is the star of the holidays, whether it’s the centerpiece of your dinner table or the welcome mat for your guests at the front porch. These beautiful plants are a must-have for any winter home. They bloom in mid-winter, and their stunning colors are created by bracts (persistent colored leaves) instead of flowers, so they last longer than regular flowers. They even bloom naturally under the long winter nights, so nurseries can easily bring them into color in time for the holidays. The beauty of poinsettias can last from Thanksgiving through Christmas, and sometimes even to Valentine’s Day! fun fact: you can keep your poinsettia blooming all year round if you give it the right care With Smart Pots, you can easily keep your holiday poinsettias looking their best all year long or gift one to your favorite garden friend! Smart Pot planters produce healthier roots by air pruning, which creates lots of smaller, fibrous roots. These roots absorb moisture and nutrients more efficiently, so your poinsettia grows faster and year-round. Smart Pot products support healthy root growth, and strong roots mean a stronger plant. Smart Pot containers stay cooler because they allow air to flow through the sides of the fabric. This means you won’t have to worry about circling roots and can keep your poinsettia in its Smart Pot for longer than traditional containers. Let’s transplant this poinsettia from its plastic nursery pot into a powerful Smart Pot! Step 1 First, you’ll want to unfold and prepare your Smart Pot. For this project, we are using 3-Gallon Smart Pots to transplant quart-sized poinsettias. Step 2 Next, fill your Smart Pot with a high-quality potting mix about 1/3 of the way up. We like using SunGro’s Black Bear Indoor & Outdoor Potting Mix which is formulated with biochar, a sustainable alternative to perlite that optimizes aeration. This will provider a layer of fresh soil for your plant to grow in. Step 3 Then, place your poinsettia with its nursery pot inside the Smart Pot to help guide where it will sit. Fill around with soil (just above the roots) Step 4 Take out your poinsettia, and remove it from its original nursery pot. Examine the roots for any disease and plug it into the center of your Smart Pot. If necessary, backfill with more soil and when you’re ready, generously water your transplanted poinsettia. SHOWSTOPPER 📸🪴 Aside from making great gifts, when summer comes around, you can transplant your poinsettia into the garden to add a beautiful pop of color! Choose a location with well-drained soil that gets 4 to 5 hours of sun per day. Mix in organic matter such as peat moss or compost into the soil. This will help maintain soil moisture and create a good growing environment for the roots. Grow a Loving Herb Farmacy This Mother’s Day, plant a Loving Herb Farmacy for yourself or a loved one! This charming little herb garden is the…Read More Grow a Loving Herb Farmacy How to Care for Norfolk Island Pine – Lifelong Houseplant From Holiday Tree to vibrant indoor houseplant, here’s how to make your Norfolk Island Pine last for years! Remember that charming…Read More How to Care for Norfolk Island Pine – Lifelong Houseplant 5-Minute Sunflower Garden Plant a 5-Minute Sunflower Garden with Smart Pot and Park Seed Ready to brighten up your garden in no time? A…Read More 5-Minute Sunflower Garden

Bring your holiday Norfolk Island Pine back to life as a thriving indoor houseplant. With the right care and a breathable Smart Pot, these tropical evergreens can grow happily for years. Learn how to repot, refresh your soil, and keep your Norfolk hydrated, healthy, and reaching for the light all year long.

Jodi Torpey, a garden writer, certified master gardener, and author of “The Colorado Gardener’s Companion: An Insider’s Guide to Gardening in the Centennial State,” offers valuable insights on keeping houseplants in Smart Pots. Read her tips in the article “Houseplant How-To With Smart Pots - by Jodi Torpey”

Got the itch to get dirty? Too cold to plant outside? Don’t forget you can start many of those popular fruits and veggies growing indoors while this Spring weather starts to warm up. Fabric aerations containers are great for growing plants, fruits and vegetables inside. It’s easy to get your seeds started so that you have beautiful, abundant plants already growing by the time that warm sunshine becomes a daily thing. https://smartpots.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/19545-HCG-Tomatoes-SD.mp4 With hydroponic growing, you don’t need expensive fancy lights to sprout seeds. So if you’re new to this type of growing, keep in mind that florescent lights in your house will do the trick until it gets warm enough. Once warm weather decides to stick around you can simply take your plants outside and replant them. If your hydroponic plants outgrow your current pots before you’re ready to take them outside, you can simply place them in a larger size container to keep them growing nice and full.

Propagating plants is a great way to take your love of gardening to the next level, and starting plants from seed isn’t the only way to do it. Though many vegetables, annuals, and perennials are easily propagated from seed, this is not the case with houseplants. To make more houseplants, vegetative propagation is often the way to go. Instead of a new plant growing out of a seed, vegetative propagation takes a portion of a mother plant (called a propagule) and uses it to make a whole new plant. The propagule can be a piece of the mother plant’s stem, leaf, root, or even just a few cells if the plant is propagated in a tissue culture lab. Though this all may sound a bit intimidating, propagating plants in this manner is simpler than you might think, especially when it comes to houseplants. Stem cuttings are perhaps the easiest way to vegetatively propagate plants. As you might guess, the propagule used to make this type of cutting is a portion of the mother plant’s stem, usually a young, tender shoot tip. While it’s true that not all houseplants can be propagated in this way, there are many that can. https://smartpots.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/How-to-Take-Cuttings-of-Your-Favorite-Houseplants-in-5-Easy-Steps-SD.mp4 Popular houseplants that grow from cuttings: Schefflera Begonia Arrowhead Christmas cactus Croton Gardenia Jade plant Wandering Jew Hoya Pothos Philodendron Kalanchoe Geranium Dracaena Ivy Streptocarpella Chinese evergreen Five simple steps to propagating plants via stem cuttings. Gather your materials. Before trying your hand at propagating houseplants via stem cuttings, it’s important to gather the correct materials. Here are the items you’ll need: A healthy mother plant. Be sure the plant you plan to propagate is disease- and pest-free, and is healthy enough to have some of its foliage removed. A clean, sharp pair of pruning shears. A bottle of rooting hormone (available at your local garden center). A bag of peat- or coir-based, sterile potting mix. A new, one-gallon Smart Pot. A clear plastic bag large enough to enclose the entire Smart Pot. Repurposed dry cleaning bags work great for this task. Make the cut. Locate a few healthy stem tips on the mother plant. Use your pruning shears to snip off three or four of these stem tips just below a leaf node (the place on the stem where the leaf emerges). Each cutting should be three to five inches long and contain one or more leaves. Once you have all your houseplant cuttings, cut off all but the top-most two leaves from each one. Apply rooting hormone. Rooting hormone comes as either a powder, a liquid, or a gel. Regardless of which type you have, insert the bottom inch of the freshly cut end of the cutting into the hormone. Tap off the excess. Insert the cutting into sterile potting mix. Fill the Smart Pot with potting mix, tapping the bottom of the pot lightly on a tabletop to ensure no air pockets remain. Stick the hormone-coated cutting into the potting mix, cut end down, until only the top two inches of the cutting remain above the soil line. Repeat with the other cuttings. You can place three or four cuttings in a single gallon-sized Smart Pot, just be sure the cuttings do not touch. Disease can readily spread from one cutting to another if they are in contact with each other. Water, cover, and wait. Once the cuttings are in place, water them in well, using a gentle shower rather than a sharp stream. Place the entire Smart Pot inside the clear, plastic bag, and secure it with a twist tie a few inches above the plant tops. Use a stake or wire hoop to prop up the plastic bag, if necessary; it should not touch the cuttings. Place the pot of cuttings on a bright windowsill or under grow lights. Do not subject the cuttings to intense, direct sunlight as you’ll risk burning them. The plastic bag keeps the humidity high until the cuttings form their own roots, but the container may occasionally need to be watered. Check the pot every few days and add water as necessary. In four to six weeks, remove the bag and continue to regularly water the cuttings. The rooted cuttings can be lifted out of the pot a few weeks later and moved to separate containers. As you can see, propagating plants is a very rewarding task. It’s fun to see which houseplant cuttings perform the best. And sharing new plants with others just might be the most fun of all!

If you live where the snow flies, you may think winter vegetable growing is impossible. It isn’t. With a little thought and attention – and the right equipment – it’s possible to serve homegrown produce twelve months of the year. https://vimeo.com/151824867 Here are three creative ways to grow winter veggies: Start sprouting! Growing vegetable and herb sprouts is probably the easiest way to get more homegrown green into your diet during the winter months. All you need is a jar, a piece of cheesecloth, and seeds for sprouting. Most grocery stores and nurseries have packets of sprouting seeds year-round. Try radish, alfalfa, quinoa, mung beans, and kale. To grow sprouts as winter veggies, sanitize two tablespoons of seeds by soaking them in a cup of water with two tablespoons of apple cider vinegar for ten minutes. Rinse well, then place the seeds in a clean, quart-sized jar. Fill the jar with enough water to cover the seeds, and cover it with a piece of cheesecloth, using a rubber band to hold the cloth in place. Soak the seeds overnight, then drain the jar through the cheesecloth. Put the jar on its side on the kitchen counter. Rinse the seeds twice a day, draining the water after each rinse. In a few days, you’ll have fresh sprouts. Have an herbal windowsill. Another vegetable growing option during winter is to make an herb garden for the windowsill. Though not all herbs grow well indoors, there are plenty that do. Basil, chives, parsley, dill, sweet marjoram, and thyme all grow well on a windowsill. Plant them in a Smart Pot placed on a large saucer, and use a high-quality potting mix. Snip the herbs as needed, and be sure to keep them regularly trimmed to stave off leggy growth. Use lights to grow micro-greens. You might be surprised to hear you don’t need an expensive, specialty grow-light to grow this winter veggie indoors. Though flowering and fruiting plants need a certain type of light to initiate flowering, plants grown only for their “greens” do just fine with nothing more than a fluorescent tube shop-light. Micro-greens are leafy vegetables harvested while still young. They’re highly nutritious and very easy to grow, and planting them is an easy option for vegetable growing in winter. Vegetables that make great micro-greens include kale, lettuce, spinach, chard, mustard, and arugula. Some nurseries and seed catalogs sell specially blended micro-green seed mixes that offer a variety of greens in one packet. To grow micro-greens indoors, hang a four-foot, fluorescent shop-light on chains from the ceiling. Position it two to three inches above the top of the Smart Pot where you’ll be growing your micro-greens. Fill the container with high-quality potting mix and sow your micro-greens thickly at the depth recommended on the seed packet. Keep the soil well-watered as the seedlings grow, but do not overdo it. The lights should be on for sixteen to eighteen hours per day, and raise them on the chains if necessary to keep them just above the plant tops. Micro-greens are ready to harvest soon after they grow their first set of true leaves. Simply snip the plants off with a sharp pair of shears, rinse them well, and serve them on salads and sandwiches.

Smart Pots aren’t just for outdoor growing. While they’re perfect for vegetable, fruit, and ornamental flower gardeners, they’re also great for houseplant enthusiasts. Why is it so easy to grow houseplants in Smart Pots? Because Smart Pots are made of lightweight, easy-to-carry fabric, it’s easy to transport even large houseplants to the utility sink or bathtub for proper watering. Most houseplants should be watered by allowing at least 20% of the water poured into the soil to drain back out through the drainage holes; this prevents fertilizer salts from building up to damaging levels and possibly harming the plant. Heavy ceramic and terra cotta pots make watering a real chore, but because Smart Pots are porous and light, they make in-the-sink irrigation a snap. Moving tropical houseplants, such as hibiscus and gardenias, indoors and out, based on the weather, is far less of a hassle when you grow houseplants in lightweight containers. To make it easier still, put the plants on trays with rolling casters and simply wheel them in and out as necessary. Because the roots of Smart Pot-grown plants do not circle, your houseplants will never become pot-bound. You’ll find yourself transplanting them far less frequently. Dark-colored Smart Pots absorb the sun’s heat on cold winter days, if the plants are grown in a bright window. Tropical houseplants, cacti, and succulents thrive when their roots are kept cozy. Here is how to grow houseplants in Smart Pots: Because growing houseplants in fabric containers is a bit different from housing them in traditional plastic or ceramic pots, here are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind. Be mindful of watering. Smart Pots are porous, so any water added to the plant may come out through the tiny holes in the fabric as it soaks into the soil. Houseplants growing in fabric containers are best watered where the water can easily drain, without risking harm to furniture, floors, or fabrics. Move them to the sink, bathtub, shower, or somewhere outdoors for watering. Use a drainage saucer. Put a saucer, lined basket, or plate beneath each one of your houseplants. Because Smart Pots absorb and hold moisture, letting them sit directly on furniture can lead to marks and water damage. Colorful charger plates from your local department store are a beautiful and decorative way to keep tabletops protected from water damage. Do not allow water to sit in the plate or saucer, however, as this can lead to root rot. Propagating is easy! As your favorite houseplants grow, many of them can be propagated via stem cuttings. Instead of starting cuttings of your favorite jade plant, baby tears, dracaena, or English ivy in plastic nursery pots, use a Smart Pot instead. Dip the base of a piece of cut stem in powdered rooting hormone and insert the cut end into a container full of fresh potting soil. After watering, cover the entire pot with a plastic bag to keep the humidity high until roots are formed. You can start several cuttings of the same plant in a single Smart Pot, and then transplant them into separate containers when roots form six to eight weeks later. It’s easy to grow houseplants in Smart Pots and fill your home with green! Learn more about managing plant pests in your new indoor houseplants here.