Cleaning Up the AquaPots 🌿 End of Season Container Garden Cleanup

It’s the end of the growing season here in Michigan, and Ben from Garden Crossings is showing us how to clean up and store AquaPots for winter! 🌱 From frost-damaged begonias and sweet potato vines to digging out massive root systems, this behind-the-scenes cleanup is equal parts educational and entertaining. Watch how these self-watering planters make maintenance easier, what to do once plants are spent, and how to prep pots for next spring. Whether you’re a seasoned gardener or just starting out, this video will give you tips for saving time, preserving your pots, and setting yourself up for success next year.

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4902-96th Ave
Zeeland, MI 49464

Hi, this is Ben from Garden Crossings and today it’s the end of our growing season here in Michigan. So, we’re going to be pulling out our aquaots and gutting them, cleaning them out, and storing them away for the season. They were looking really nice up until last Friday, like Thursday night, Friday morning, we had a really hard frost and a lot of things started to melt in the aqua pots as you can see. So, they’re toasted. They’re It’s time to go. If anybody watched the first video when we planted up these aquaots, I know Heidi was doing videos throughout the summer so you could see kind of how they evolved through the growing stages. And this is what they look like at the end of the season when some frost hits them. So your plants like beonia, sweet potato vine, uh elephant ears, stuff like that that likes it warmer, that’s what really gets hit hard. You can see the patunias still look decent in this pot. So, this one we did, just for a little recap, we had elephant ear, we had beonia, and then we had latte super tuna in these. I really liked how they turned out. We used this recipe last year, so we just did a repeat of that. And this was a customer favorite from what I heard. So, I think we might do it again. Maybe we’ll tweak the beonia, maybe the latte. I don’t know. We’ll do something a little different. But, uh, it’s a good combo. Really like that one. So this pot here, our showcase was Thumbersia and you can see it went crazy. So we had some porchakas in here and I can’t even remember what the third plant was. It got eaten alive by this thumb though through the summer. But this year I did some bamboo stakes so it could get growing up and I think it turned out really cool. Had a lot of nice pretty orange flowers on it. But you could see it just took over our entire landscape. So, this one’s going to be a lot of fun to try and get all these vines out and rip it out. So, there’s our Thumbersia pot for the season. So, here’s one of our smaller pots that are in front of the garden center here. And still looks pretty decent. This pot we had angelonia white, we had bright lights purple, tropical sunrise, uh, calvoa. We had it blew my mind in here someplace. You might be able to see a little bit of it around the back there. That one started to get eaten. But this pot did really good. I noticed that probably the last 6 weeks or so is when the angelonia really started to do a nice show. There was a point in the summer where it didn’t have a ton of blooms on it, but now a ton of purple and the tropical sunrise looked good the whole the whole growing season. Okay, these were our showcase pots in front of the garden center here. So, we did two matching on either side of the the roof here. And this one did really good all season. We had the Salvia uh rocking deep purple, which is just covered in bees right now. It’s a great pollinator one. We have pink lemonade, calibera, silver falls, and then inside here, you can see we had uh pink geranium, too. Um, it’s crazy how big the salvia got in this pot. I think I did three of them in one of the pots and it just took over. And we did have a pretty substantial rainstorm probably a month ago or so. And with the water running off the roof line, it started to split the salvia. Um, but still they look really nice going into the last week of uh October here. So now I’m going to showcase a little bit of our uh front landscape here still. So, we had our yellow canas in the middle here and those really took off probably 5 6 weeks ago and just beautiful out here. And then we have Jaspberry patunia, which is my favorite one right now. Still my favorite annual. And then gold dust in the front. And the weather has played really well in our favor this year. The front bed still looks really good. There’s been years in the past where um we ended up gutting out this whole landscape because it wasn’t looking good and we did a bunch of fall plantings which was beautiful, but we decided a few weeks ago that the front landscape still looks so good. The annuals still look amazing. So, we’re just going to leave it. And you can see even after a couple frosts, Jaspberry still looking great. Which uh lead into the next aqua pot here. And just in case anybody doesn’t know what an aqua pot is, has a self uh watering reservoir in it. So, there’s a plate in the middle of the pot and a tube that goes down and you put your soil in and you push it down the tube and it creates a nice big pocket in there for water to go in. And then you have a fill tube on the back side of your pot and then a little spill hole. Um, so you can fill that up and you can go almost a week depending on uh, you know, where you’re where you have it at, depending on sunlight and heat and everything. But only having to water it once to twice a week saves a lot of maintenance time. And then with the spill hole, even if you have a week straight of rain, you’re it’s never going to get swamped out. Your roots are never going to rot because there’s always going to be just enough water in that reservoir. So, uh, this aqua pot here, we did, uh, two different sweet potato vines. We did jet black and we did Medusa. As you can see, they kind of melted from the frost. We had looks like I think we had hot pink mini vista patunia in here. And then we had salvia playing the blues. And with the salvia, we actually had three of them up top here. And we had a big windstorm one day and two of the big tears kind of cracked off. One fell down here but didn’t crack and I left it and the sweet potato vine actually kind of grew back over it and it looks kind of cool popping out the bottom there. So, uh, this pot also performed really well this year. So, this pot here, I did tiara pink as our main feature plant in it. This is the first year I’ve used this in one of the aqua pots and I only used two of them and you can see it took over the entire pot. I also had bralia in here, some angelonia pink which you can still see a little bit of that’s poking out and I might have even had some sweet potato vine and some type another spiller in here but the tiarara pink just totally ate it. It actually spilled out into the landscape a little bit but looked amazing. Um, we used the tiara pink in our hanging baskets in the front of the store this year, too. We used it in the landscape, and that’s uh one patunia I’m really liking a lot. Um, I thought it did good in all the places we used it this year. Um, very aggressive though, so you it’s almost like a bubble gum where if you got a big space you want to fill and you only need a few of these and it’ll really fill it in. So, uh, that’s another great pot this year. The joke always was, “Too bad we don’t have a mannequin that we could have put in this pot because wouldn’t that have made just the absolute perfect dress?” Logan’s being our model right now. Uh, you know, he he’s taking one for the team doing this, but man, can you imagine? Wouldn’t that be a gorgeous dress? And lastly, we have what I call is our Halloween pot. I did this same combo last year, too, and I really liked how it turned out. We got the black sweet potato vine, the vermillionaire. We had yellow non-stop beonas in there. The beonas got eaten alive. You can see, you can’t see them anymore, but they looked good throughout the summer. They did really well. I thought this pot did really good again, and I would be tempted to do the same kind of combo again for next year someplace around here. Vermillionaire is great for hummingbirds. It’s another reason I put it right outside of Rod’s office. so he can watch the hummingbirds if he ever gets bored in there, which I’m sure he never gets bored. But but yeah, I was very impressed with how all the aquapots did this year. I think it was a good plant selection, a lot of uh fun plantings, and we’ll have to see what we can uh cook up from for next year, tweak some stuff, leave some stuff the same. Um but now Logan and I got the task of gutting all these things. So uh we’re going to we’re going to get to ripping them out. So, cheers from Garden Crossings. Right now, they’re kind of planning out how they’re going to be uh moving this big boy. There’s three guys on this job right now. There is still some water in it because obviously we can’t drain the water out, but we can stop watering. Problem is is we had about 3 in of rain um over the weekend. So, even though we stopped watering, the rain filled up the reservoir. So, not only is the pot itself with the soil in it ridiculously heavy, all of that foliage on top, also adds to a ton of weight. And oh, look at here. So, they’re actually just tipping it on its side. And because of all that foliage, it’s creating kind of a cushion underneath the pot. So, I don’t know that this is typically like the way I would recommend doing it, but that did work pretty good for them. We actually had some pots uh in our walkway that the wind blew over and we were thankful at that point for the huge foliage canopy because as the pot tipped over, it just cushioned it on its way down and over. So, we’re going to head over to the compost pile a minute and get this emptied out. I want to show you the root system. Um it’s it’s going to be ridiculous once we see it. So, let’s go head on over and see what it looks like with them taking it out. There is just a ton of water pouring out of that pot right now. So, all of that is just excess weight that is totally um not needed, especially when you’re trying to move these things. So, Logan’s sitting on the pot holding the pot back while Ben is trying to yank all the plants out. Yeah, dirt’s flying everywhere. Aquapotss definitely do grow a very good plant. Plan B. I’ll put my foot on here and I’ll pull. All right. Trying to come up with plan B. It’s getting creative over here, folks. Wow, look at that mass of roots. See, that’s where the aquapots are great. They really um grow excellent root systems. And that’s the reason, too, why these plants, they get so big is because they’re getting watered constantly. They’re getting fed constantly because we put fertilizer, water-soluble fertilizer down in those pots. So, these plants are getting fed all summer long, and it’s going to take some cleaning to pull all those roots off the cone there of the insert that Ben was referring to that sets down in that aqua pot. Look at that. Pulling all that off there. Let me tell you, the smell right now is not pleasant. All this kind of breaking broken down um compost and stuff. But that is just a massive root ball. And that’s what it takes. It takes strong roots to create healthy plants. Now, the princess pot is getting unearthed. You can just see all of that foliage that Logan just pulled up out of the Jaspberry patunias that were on the ground. Again, they’re going to go with that tipping method, especially with that canopy of all that super super tuna foliage. It’s going to give them a nice cushion, a nice base to just roll it on its side and push it up on the pallets. I mean, it’s nice to have these gorgeous huge planters, but it is literally a lot of work. And that’s why these big huge planters um typically aren’t the size that’s sold to um a home home consumer because most people, you know, just an average home wouldn’t be able to move these things. Obviously, you can see we’re using a high low to to get them transported around and they’re just Yeah, definitely very heavy. Uh but because we got the garden center here, we want to have big impact. And to have big impact and lots of plants, um you got to have big pots. Look at that. It’s ripping it ripping it out. And you can see the gaping hole it’s leaving behind. So once they have all the pots cleaned out, um they’re going to come through. Maybe not today, but probably in the next week, I’m guessing, and rip out all these patunias as well. We’re in Michigan. It’s a zone 6A, as Ben mentioned earlier. We have had our first frost for the season, so all of the tender annuals have been hit. Obviously, patunias, it can handle more uh cold than a lot of the other plants can. So, they’re still holding on a little bit. Uh but definitely it is end of season here in time for all of these gorgeous annuals to be torn out and the garden center kind of just tidied up for the fall. We’re going to just show you one more of these pots getting emptied out. They’ve got several more to go, but it’s going to all be kind of the same um process of how they’re doing it. I guess at least if he falls backwards, he’ll land into a nice cushion of flowers. Yeah. So, this one as they’re pulling it, the foliage is kind of breaking more. So, like as they’re pulling, the plant’s breaking off. We did cut the branches off of the palm. It would be kind of funny and show you the dress. So, that also kind of eliminated some of the leverage for them to hold on to to pull out this foliage. Right now, he’s pulling on the fill tube, trying to see if that could help uh get some movement. There we go. Rocked it out. So Ben’s got a hold of the palm trunk there. I don’t really know what I’m doing. And that’s kind of helping get most of the the root ball out. The patuni top pulled right off. There you go. Tip it upside down. Now, interestingly enough, this one doesn’t have as much of a root ball as the prior one we did. And part of the reason is is because it depends on what plants that you’re putting into these containers. Some plants just naturally have a more prolific uh root structure than others. Patuniius typically don’t have a very thick root structure so they’re easy to pull out. Um but I think it was probably the sweet potato vine in that last pot along with maybe even that kufia that had a really really thick dense rut structure. So, that is how these babies get cleaned out and what they look like um once they’re emptied. So, the next thing they’ll do once they’re ready is they’ll take them in the greenhouse, give them a good old power wash, get all the soil out of them, any roots that are left in it, get that all out, and get them cleaned up, packed away for next year. That is a beauty with aquapots. Even though they are a little bit pricey, they can be used for years and years and years of enjoyment and um also the time-saving factor that they have without having to water every single day is a huge blessing. Thank you for watching today. If you have any questions, comments, uh you can comment below. Uh please subscribe to our channel and uh happy planting everyone. [Music]