Plastic Pots by C. Ovate, R. Pistrum and R. Pistrum, LDR

At the CB we find a great many uses for plastic pots, the ones plants may come in from your friendly retail nursery. Here are some of the different ones we have accumulated at the CB. From left to right that's a three gallon, a one gallon, a six inch and a four inch. They also come in much bigger sizes, five, ten and even fifty gallon ones, and variously littler sizes but the ones littler than four inches are usually combined into a group and called a tray. There are a good many different tray types and these are identifiable by the number of cells per tray which are actually little pots fused together. All these trays with their different numbers of cells have their uses, but that is not today's very important and interesting subtopic.

Today's subtopic is, what you can do with the useful plastic pots once the plants are out of them. Here are some of the many uses we put them to at the CB.

1. Temporary repositories for alien weeds we have pulled up.

2. Outdoor trash cans.

3. Temporary decorative Buda limestone holders.

4. Stump regrowth inhibitors. When we cut down an unwanted invasive tree we invert an appropriately sized pot over the stump and the pot keeps the stump from resprouting.

5. One can, of course, put new plants into the useful pots.

6. Party hats.

7. And we make artifacts out of them. For example, the faceplate for the laser collimator we use to confirm collimation of the Newtonian telescope was cut from a yellow four inch pot. Nearby, is a picture of a light shield we made from a five gallon pot. It helps keep unwanted light from getting into the telescope tube and aggravating us. All one has to do is cut the walls of a five gallon so the little end has a 10 inch inner diameter, then staple the cut together and tape it over with electric tape. You may notice that without the light shield, the telescope focuser is only about five inches from the end of the telescope and that means the secondary mirror is also only about five inches down the tube.