Flower pot sizes

[workhorse]

Can someone tell me why some flower pots sizes are shown in inches, while others are shown in Litres.

[grasser]

sorry i dont know either would like to though

[Herbie]

Could it be that the pot holds a certain amount of litres of compost?

[Cutecumber]

It's just two ways of measuring, that's all.

They mean different things, of course. There is limited value in knowing how wide the top of a pot is. A pot which is 30cm across at the top could be 30 cm deep or 50cm.

Volume or capacity is more useful if you use non-standard flower pots.

I - sad as I am - measure the dimensions of all my containers and work out the volume if it is not marked on the pot itself. This helps me work out how many plants they are likely to support.

[SarzWix]

It's quite confusing isn't it? It seems like the smaller pots are measured in size across the top, medium ones in volume, then the big, patio size pots go back to size! Eventually, you 'get your eye in' so to speak and can tell by looking at them what size will do for which plant. Until then, I guess it's trial and error

[workhorse]

Oh, how I hate trial and error. I tend to end up making more errors, which can tend to be a bit costly.

I suppose its back to the drawing board for me.

[Snadger]

It was even more confusing if you were a Victorian gardener as the clay pots didn't have sizes, only numbers. Hence the advice in books to take plant out of a number 32 pot and pot it up into a number 14 pot.
Evidently the way the numbers worked was how many clay pots could be 'thrown' from a given weight of clay, ie same amount of clay made bigger number of smaller pots, or smaller number of bigger pots!

Now that IS confusing!

[terrier]

What's all the fuss about pot size anyway. If you plant something in the ground you can't get a bigger pot than that and it still grows? I would work on the theory, whats the smallest pot I can use for this size of plant to save on compost. If the pot fits, plant it.

[pbuk]

This is confusing as many books refer to the size of the pot and do not actually say if its the diameter, volume or the height. I would not be buying these books if I knew all this!

Anyway..

[Suky]

Usually the measurement refers to the diameter. My problems come when the instructions say 'small pot' etc

[Florence Fennel]

I just start off small and pot up one size bigger each time until I reach the size I think will do - like Sarz said, you get to know "by eye", I don't really use measurement.