cleaning pots from a greenhouse

Hi! I am volunteering at a city botanic garden in central florida. There were a lot of pots unearthed on a restoration of the greenhouse which has chainlink walls and a rigid plastic roof. I am about to launch a pot cleaning effort because some of these pots have been sitting outside of the greenhouse and are covered with green moss and who knows what fungi lurk in them.
I have read recipes online for using vinegar and water and bleach and water and wondered if I can use the spray bathroom cleaner that contains clorox. What is your experience with this? I am trying to reclaim some ordinary sized pots and some really large terracotta bowls.
Thanks,
Martha

I scour them out and then run them through the dishwasher.

I wouldn't use vinegar or salt as both are deadly to plants and salt buildup in old terracotta is already a problem. Sterilizing the pots before reuse is the biggest thing - you don't want to introduce any viruses into your new plants. Scrub off all the dirt then soak them in a bleach bath (a cup of bleach to a gallon of water) for at least an hour. To get rid of the bleach, scrub them with dish soap and rinse well.

That will do it.

Daisy

I take a 50 gallon drum and throw all my pots down in a mixture of dish soap and let them soak. Ona warm day I take the hose to them and spread them out to dry. Almost all the pots come squeekie clean as soon as they get hit by the hose. On a small scale you could use 5 gallon pails.

This message was edited Jul 13, 2015 5:08 AM

Thanks! I was thinking of 17 gallon storage tub. I just moved and I have a bunch of the heavy duty ones. I am also going to clean off their collection of hand tools.
Martha

A 17 gallon tub will do nicely.

It worked just fine this morning. I only did two pots, but they were major terra cotta pieces, a huge bowl and one of those TC window boxes that had raised decorations. I put the window box in the soapy water, but the bowl was too large so I just placed it on an open black plastic bag and cleaned it that way. They look ever so much better.
Martha

A cup of bleach per gallon seems a bit excessive. I would use, at the most, half that rate. 1/4C. should be sufficient.

The recommended rate to kill plant viruses and pathogens is a 10% bleach solution. That would be 1 cup bleach to 9 cups water. I recommended using 1 cup of bleach in 16 cups of water, a 6% solution.

Hopefully Gardenmart didn't have to worry about those things as she did not use the bleach sterilization I recommended. As the pots were from an old greenhouse, I would have bleached the heck out of them.

Daisy

Daisy,
I forgot to mention that I had a ten percent bleach solution in a spray bottle which I used to douse the pots before I scrubbed in the soapy water. The pots thanked me for it!
Thanks everyone for all of your advice!
Martha

Great! Enjoy your reclaimed pots. What are you growing in them?

Daisy

pot? lol

No, earthworms. (according to my Florida cousin, if someone says he's going to go dig for worms, he is actually going to visit his pot farm).

The pots belong to the botanic garden where I volunteer. I have been weeding and rehabbing them. No one paid these bowls full of succulents much attention for a long time. several of them had to be emptied and I scrubbed those out and then repotted everything. There were also a couple of empty ones and I cleaned those too.
I did some of my own smaller pots that I got from a yard sale that were still full of potting soil.
Martha

Were any of the succulents still alive? That would be fun to find an old pot of old succulents that had been left to his own devices for about 50 years. I am visualizing an old Victorian style greenhouse with glass walls and towering ceilings full of cool plants covered in moss. 8')

Daisy

Yes. They still had some plants in them. They were infested with zillions of mother of thousands, a kalanchoe. Essentially I weeded them out though in some of the pots the MOT were so big I had to empty them to remove them and then repot the other plants.
Martha

MOT - my second greenhouse weed. #1 is Maidenhair Ferns - California Maidenhair and 5-fingered maidenhair (also a native).

My most prolific g'house weed is oxalis. I cannot fathom WHY people pay good money for that crap. I cannot get rid of it.

Ah-Oh! I put a purple oxalis in my greenhouse last winter and noticed a couple days ago that there was a little one coming up in another pot.

Oxalis doesn't spread like that for me, hmmm I can just barely keep one alive.

My pots are FULL of it...............I have no clue where it came from, as I have never bought any. I suppose it wandered in in some compost or in some pots of boarder plants. *sigh*

Oxalis around here has bulbs, but most of mine is old-timey hardy oxalis. My little purple oxalis plant I have tried to get to multiply just barely gets through each year with about 2 diebacks

It's the green crap with the little yellow flowers. What an abomination..........

wood sorrel?

No. Oxalis. Weed-type oxalis. But then, it is ALL weed-type to ME!

ok, never seen it, guess I have been very lucky! but we are so dry it might not grow here. Johnson grass, now that grows here.

Wood Sorrel is an Oxalis.