The Dracena genus of plants includes a variety of beautiful and hardy specimens, very popular for indoor houseplants. Buy one, help clean your air! My Dracena is an $8 grocery store purchase that has survived for 3 years on a south-facing windowsill and looks just fine, it might be Dracena marginata since the leaves have red edging. The plant had been in the same pot for over 2 years, and it had grown steadily during that time, so I unpotted it and found that there was almost no soil left around the roots. Time to repot! Unfortunately the hardware store near me does not sell low-cost large flexible plastic plant pots. But they do sell large expensive-y ceramic pots....no thanks. Good thing I had a freestyle find to help get the job done.
The plastic on these green plant pots is oddly brittle and the top had split
in a few places (maybe why someone discarded them during the summer). I reinforced the top with a loop of duct tape all
around the outside so that any handling wouldn't cause the whole thing to break apart. Functional, but not very pretty.
On the top of the pot in places where it was split I added tape over the top like in the photo below.
As you can see in the photo above and below I added a layer of rocks over the soil, hopefully this will help prevent fungus gnats from taking up residence in the dirt. I paid for the decorative rocks. It was a $7 moment of weakness.
To make the whole package a little prettier I put the planter into a cachepot - a fancy term for a ceramic planter without holes in the bottom. This helps to obscure the duct-tape repairs since the planter sits a few inches below the edge of the cachepot. This cachepot was one I had on hand, originally purchased at Ikea for $20.
The final repotted Dracena looks lovely in its new home. I'm glad I found a way to repair and reuse the brittle green plastic planters.
Happy gardening and freestyling!