I am having trouble understanding pot sizes.

Hello,

I am into cacti and succulents.

I am told succulents like shallow pots????? What is a shallow pot from a cacti pot????/

Can anyone line up pots and take a picture and then explain to me which pots are best for cacti and succulents?
I would really appreciate it very much as I am a visual person and don't quite understand the difference between shallow and normal pots.

Please help.

Debi
From DownUnder

I don't have any pictures I can share, but hopefully this will help. "Normal" pots are usually either slightly taller than they are wide, or the width and height are pretty close the same. Shallow pots are wider than they are tall. You'll really only notice the difference when you get up to larger pot sizes though, for small pots the normal ones work just fine and I'm not sure if they even sell really small pots that are shallower than the normal ones. You might also head over to the cacti & succulents forum, they probably have some pics of appropriate pots over there.

There are pots (usually called azalea pots) which are wider than they are tall, but not extremely so. They are actually suitable for many annuals. If you grow a lot of things in pots, you may notice when you empty a tall pot that the roots often don't reach the bottom.

The quite shallow pots that you are talking about aren't easy to find. I guess you've found that out. For example, a pot that measures 8 inches across may be only 4 inches tall, or even fewer.

I don't want to sound preachy, but cacti and other succulents have two sources of water in the wild. One is ground water, for which they often send down a tap root. The other is infrequent rains or, more likely, thunderstorms. Their roots are very shallow, and spread out for a relatively large area, so that when there IS rain, they can soak up as much as possible and store it to live on until the next rain. These plants in containers don't develop the tap root, but they do have the shallow roots. So if we plant them in deep pots and there is a lot of soil UNDER the root system, it can stay wet after we water the plants, and can turn sour and cause root rot. That is the reason that it is recommended that succulents be planted in more shallow-type pots.

Hi dp72,

Thank you so much for the extent you have gone through to help me understand.

And I actually do think I understand now, even though I have not "seen" a picture.

I went out and found these, are they the cups???

Thanks Mate,

Debi

I'm sorry this picture is blurry- I copied it off the Internet- but this will give you an idea of what succulent pots look like. They are wide in comparison to their height.

Ordinary pots are fine. You might put bark mulch in the bottom 1/3 of a tall pot so that there is not so much soil beneath the shallow roots of the succulent. That way there is less chance of root rot. Clay pots breathe and that is good- they hold water for a shorter period of time. And don't water as often if you're using deeper pots.