Hi all,

I found a some trash at a construction site where I park everyday on the way to work. It looked a lot like one of those air pots and if I'm not mistaken it's used for a moisture repellent barrier when constructing buildings.

For those who've not seen or understand how air pots work this link might be helpful http://www.airpotgarden.com/store/index.php?app=gbu0&ns=display&ref=airpotworks

I used a 13 inch diameter pot saucer as the base and drilled a series of holes for drainage. Then I went through the painstaking process of srubbing out the dust and dirt out of the "eggshell like" crevices. To find out the length that I needed to cut with a jigsaw I took 13 inches multiplied by Pi and added one or two more inches so that the edges could overlap by that same one or two inches for the cable ties to tie it down around the pot saucer.

After getting the plastic sheeting cut to size I drilled holes in each of the "eggshell like" holes only on one side. As per advice read from gardenweb and personal experience the top two inches usually dry off quicker than the bottom of the pot. So what I did was to drill into every hole except for the top to inches. This helps to maintain some moisture at the top of the pot.

The saucer is held by its lip on the inside eggshells and I cable tied it down so that it locks into place. The saucer is sitting about half an inch above ground (pretty similar to the airpot in the link above).

I went on to repot a ficus lyrata that wasn't doing well in its previous clay based soil into this air pot using a 5-2 pine bark perlite mix (my pine bark had quite a lot of fines and I followed my previous recipe for a ficus elastica which it's root system are very similar and was doing really well pushing out new growth every week).

I can explain in detail if there are any questions. But I'm hoping that my DIY air pot works well.

Does anyone have any experience growing in this type of pot?

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Thanks