Planting

 This coworker of mine lives in a co-op, and they removed her fence, said she couldn't have it. So we've been working on a solution for quite some time.

She bought these giant plastic vases from Builders Square. We started out putting bricks in the bottom to keep them in place while we thought out how to fill them. 

We looked at a few places, but money was tight, so suburban lawn and garden wasn't for her. We ended up getting some plants at builders square. 

These are big vases, and when she's pinching pennies, she has some strange ideas. Filling up the whole thing with potting soil cost too much, she thought about wood chips, but passed on that too. 

Eventually she got some evergreen things, and made me pack half the vase with styrofoam kernels from the U-Haul store. I didn't know U-Haul had a store until today, I just discovered she had giant bags of Styrofoam.

Anyway, packed in the styrofoam, covered it with some kind of black plastic that lets water through, then packed in the plant and miracle grow potting soil.  Did this for four vases.

Our last vase actually contained a fake plant. We packed that one with wood chips, I'm certain of it, but she doesn't remember that.

A heavy rain hit a few weeks later, and we had three pots full of waterlogged mud with worms in it. The plants all died,  and I ended up dumping slop water for hours. 

She wanted me to try again this year. This time I used a knife to poke holes in the bottom before filling them.

The fake plant vase still contained gallons of rain water and rotting wood chips. When I went to poke holes in the vases, I made a surprising discovery: The pots have a small patch on either side of the base, one a knife can go through with little or no effort.

When I cut open the patch on the pot containing the fake plant, all those gallons of stagnant water came gushing out.

The big lesson: Giant outdoor plant vases need to have a hole in the bottom somewhere, and often it's built into the design, if you just search for it.