egardener,

It certainly won't hurt to do some experiments with clay pots or with pieces of broken clay pots. For all I know, pulverized clay pots might be a good soil amendment.

I didn't become very excited about clay pots from reading the article, because it presented clay pots as a means of keeping nutrients from leaching out. My feeling is that if nutrients leach out, I just add some more nutrients in liquid form.

However, if I did have access to a bunch of free unused broken clay pots, I might be tempted to break them up more finely and experiment with the pulverized clay pots as a soil amendment or as a sterile growing medium amendment.

Clay pots used as plant containers that aren't adequately flushed with excess water can become white with accumulated salts. Those are salts in the generic sense, and not just sodium chloride.

But I would not want to have anything to do with used clay pots. They could even have toxic materials in them. Also, I don't like to handle clay pots because they are heavy and susceptible to breakage.

I start many of my seedlings in plastic pots made from the bottoms of 2-liter soft drink bottles. They are very lightweight, unbreakable, inexpensive, and you can see the root growth through the clear sides of the pots.

Also, their flexibility is a big advantage when it comes time to set the seedlings into the ground. You can "knead" the pot to loosen the root ball and it just falls out in your hand ready for setting in a hole in the garden soil. I rely on my sterile growing medium, Premier Pro Mix BX, to retain the nutrients and prevent them from leaching.

The Pro Mix seems to do a good job of that, as you can see from this pepper plant that actually has peppers on it. That pepper was nicely root-bound and ready for setting out in the garden. The roots hold the rootball together just about as well as a giant Jiffy Pot would, only the exposed roots are ready to immediately grow into the garden soil.

MM