I Found The PERFECT FRUIT TREE CONTAINER!.mp4

Good afternoon, gardeners. It's Tuesday, March 9th, and it is a gorgeous spring-like day here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina, and I have been spending months and months searching for the perfect fruit tree container to up-pot some of my fruit trees into in the spring, and I finally found that container, and I want to share that container with you right now. Now, I have a number of fruit trees that I'm growing in containers, and I have been looking since last fall for the ideal container to up-pot them into the spring once the frost and freezes stop, and I have a total of six criteria that I had in mind when I was looking for the perfect fruit tree container, and those six criteria are size, cost, mobility, durability, color, and aesthetics, and after much searching and a little bit of compromise, I have met all six of those criteria. If you've watched my videos for a while, you know I'm growing a lot of different fruit trees in five-gallon paint buckets. I love using five-gallon paint buckets for initially trialing varieties of fruit trees because the buckets are cheap and they're large enough to contain a tree for one to two seasons in order to test its fruit. However, none of my fruit trees are intended to be in five-gallon buckets for the long term. If I like the fruit tree variety and I can plant that tree in ground where I live, I will do so. However, for the fruit trees that must remain confined in containers for various climatic reasons, they must eventually be up-potted to larger containers because five gallon paint buckets are simply too small for permanent use. So let's start from the very first criteria, and that is size. This right here is a number 15 nursery container, also known as a 15 gallon nursery container, and it has a top inner diameter of 16.75 inches, a bottom diameter of 14 inches, and a total height of 15 inches. And here you can see what this 15-gallon nursery container looks like compared to a five-gallon paint bucket. You'll see it's ever so slightly taller and it is much larger in diameter and has much more space for potting mix. And the reason why I chose a number 15 nursery container is because it is the ideal blend of size and mobility. I wanted to have a nursery container where I can let my fruit trees become as large as they possibly could, but I also need a nursery container that wouldn't be so large that I wouldn't be able to pick it up and move it in case we got a hurricane or a really bad winter storm or something like that. And this container right here, I still have the ability to pick up. It's not overly heavy. It's heavy, don't get me wrong, but I can move it if need be. I can pick this up with not too much effort and get it on some type of garden cart and wheel it away. So moving from a five-gallon paint bucket to a number 15 container is going to give my trees the ability to grow much more root structure and support much more fruit development. But there is something that you must understand when it comes to the gallon sizing of nursery containers. Nursery containers are not listed in true gallon measures for volume. They're listed in trade gallons. A five-gallon paint bucket like you see right here actually is truly five gallons in terms of liquid volume. If you go out and you purchase five one-gallon containers of milk and you dump all five into this paint bucket, you will get all five gallons of milk into this paint bucket. These five-gallon buckets are measured in terms of liquid measure because paint is a liquid. So when you get a five-gallon paint bucket, it will hold five true gallons of liquid paint. That is not the case when it comes to the trade gallons of nursery containers. Now I did the math on this and a 15-gallon nursery pot is actually 12.09 gallons of liquid measure. They are measured in terms of uncompacted soil. So if I go out and I buy a bag of potting mix, you can take that potting mix and you can buy a nuclear compression gauge and you can compress that down. There's something called 100% compaction. So whatever that measure of 100% compaction is, they're saying if I buy 15 gallons of potting mix, then I take a nuclear compression gauge and I compress that down to 100% compaction, I will fit it in 12.09 gallons. So this 12.09 gallon container will hold 15 gallons of potting mix. If I pour all 15 gallons in and I compress it down to 100% compaction. Sound confusing? It is. I'm confused too, but that's how these are measured. So in reality, a 15-gallon nursery pot is only going to hold about 2.45-gallon paint buckets worth of soil. It's not going to hold three. So check your math on that. So that's why I settled on the size. Now I briefly mentioned mobility before. If I get a container that's too large for me to be able to pick it up and move it around, that doesn't really help me. So I wanted to get the largest size that I could comfortably maneuver if I ever need to move my containers. The next most important thing, of course, was cost. And I went to more garden stores that I care to mention to try to look for an affordable container. And it is just absurd the cost of a simple garden container. Most garden containers were anywhere from $25 to $40, which is just ridiculous. The cheapest garden containers I could find were these resin fake-looking half wine barrels or half oak barrels that were being sold at Lowe's for about $15 a piece. And I really considered them because they were a good size, but there were two things I really didn't like about them. The first thing was they were too short. They were actually shorter than the overall height of the five-gallon bucket, which I did not like. And they were so squat as a result of that. So they were very low to the ground and very wide. They also had nothing for me to grip. There were no handles or any edges. So I really wanted something that was taller and had some edges to grip to that were an affordable price. And I was actually able to get these for $12 shipped, which is absolutely amazing considering how much they gouged you for for nursery containers. I looked all over the internet at countless nursery supply stores. And what I found was while you could get really cheap bulk rates for nursery containers, the shipping was just absurd. So most of these companies, they would factor in something like three or $400 freight shipping because they were assuming that you were buying pallets of thousands of these. So I finally found a seller that was selling these. I guess they must've bought pallets of these things and they were sectioning them out into packs of 10. So with shipping included, I was able to get these for 12 bucks a pot. Plus they threw in an 11th container for free. So I really got these for $11 a pot delivered to my door. And while that probably seems like a rip off for something that probably costs about $1.50 to make, these are really high quality. They're really nice and they should hold up for many years. So are they expensive? Yes, but they're the best deal I could find overall. So there's still your best deal no matter how you look at it. And that brings me to my next point, durability. We don't want to be replacing these every year or two because they're so expensive and they're so hard to get. So you want to get something that is thick, that is crack resistant, that has some kind of lip that you'll be able to grab onto and it won't fall apart when you pull up on the lip under the weight of the tree. You want something that is UV resistant that the sun is not going to cook. And because these are UV resistant, injection molded, heavy duty, super thick nursery containers, I know these are going to last many years. That is the most important thing. These paint buckets are not UV resistant. I've only been using this paint bucket for one season and look what's happening. The sun here has completely bleached the container. It's eaten through it. Look how it's just chipping off. That's after one season. And while I could have gotten another season out of this bucket, look at that. That's just flaking off from just sitting out in the sun for a year. While I could get another season out of this bucket, best case, I'd still be replacing these every two years, which is not really economically viable. And what also happens is you get the cracks along the handles in these buckets. So if I were to simply lift it up, these handles usually break off come the second season. So it doesn't really leave you with a convenient way to pick up your plants if you need to move them. That's why I wanted this container because it's UV resistant. It has this nice heavy duty lip in case I need to stick my fingers under there and pick it up. And believe me, I did try to get creative. I was looking at those big 20 gallon cooler tubs that you put your ice and your beer in that they sell at Home Depot for like eight or nine dollars. And they had those nice rope handles, but you know what? They're not UV treated and they're going to fail and you're going to have to replace them every one or two years. Well, I don't want to do that. It's going to be way more work and cost in the long run. So just get something that's going to hold up from the get go for a few dollars more. Now, the next thing I want to discuss is the color. Believe it or not, I wanted a black container. And the reason why I wanted the black container is because the black containers heat up well in the sun. The majority of trees that I will be putting in this container are fig trees and fig trees really like heat. They like to have the roots warm up. In addition, they wake up faster in the winter from dormancy in black containers because the roots heat up and come to temperature more quickly. And that added heat that I'll get from the black, that solar attraction, that's a big plus for me. If you live in a place like Phoenix or Las Vegas, that may be detrimental to you. It's pretty hot here on the southeastern coast of North Carolina. We get strong solar intensity and I've found that dark containers do not adversely affect my trees here. However, keep your environment in mind. If you live in the desert southwest and the sun is too intense for black containers, you could always drape something over them. You could place shade cloth over them. You could even paint them white or you can try and find white containers from the get go. But for me, it's a big plus. And the very last thing is aesthetics. I did want something that looks good and that's probably the biggest compromise here. Because these are just regular nursery containers, they're not as good looking as some kind of decorative container. However, the decorative containers are absurdly expensive. They're often $25, $35, $40. Not really worth it to me when I have to buy so many of them. I will go broke doing that. So I decided to settle on uniformity. While each individual container may not be the best looking, it will look good if I put everything in a nice straight line and everything is completely uniform and symmetric. They may not be the best looking thing in the world, but they are not particularly bad looking either. And now I just want to bring you in for a nice side by side on my new containers versus my old five gallon paint buckets. You can see how much larger they are. You can see how much nicer they are. They have a total of six generous drain holes in the bottom and they're pretty thick. So they're pretty wide drain holes. So I should get really good drainage out of this. Really happy about the quality. Whoa, there goes Dale. Whoa, buddy. He's doing his zoomies. Whoa. He's like a freight train. And then you can see what the rest of the containers looks like. You can see them all stacked up there. They're nice and uniform. They all came in great condition. So I'm very happy with this seller. I will recommend them strongly. And again, the seller is linked in my Amazon storefront. If they run out of stock on Amazon, the same seller also sells these on eBay for a similar price. So keep that in mind as well. So overall, I'm pretty thrilled with my purchase. I can't say I've ever been excited to get a shipment of empty containers before, but I definitely was excited to receive these. And I was thrilled with what arrived at my doorstep. They're all in great condition. They were packed well, and I will be slowly potting a lot of my trees into these spare containers throughout the spring to get them ready for a summer harvest. So everyone, I really hope you found this video helpful. If you did, please make sure to hit that like button. And if you haven't already subscribed to the channel, please subscribe for future updates and more videos like these. If you're curious about any of the products that I use in my garden in general, or you're looking for these pots, again, they are linked in my Amazon storefront in the video description. Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope to see all of you again on the next video.