More fall duties bringing in the pots

Now that the temperature is falling below freezing at night we need to bring in all the ceramic pottery.
This includes all terra cotta pots, glazed ceramic pots and any other pots or crockery that might break when left out.

There seems to be a misconception about freezing and breaking pots. We make terra cotta bird houses and feeders and we leave them out all year with no damage. But if we were to leave a terra cotta pot with dirt out the pot would probably break.

The reason the pots break is they are filled with soil which holds moisture and when the moisture freezes it expands and the pots break. The bird feeders have no place for the water or soil to collect and the shape is such that even if there were wet bird feed in the feeder it could not break.

Smaller pots are emptied into a wheel barrow and the collected soil is removed to one of the compost piles. The same goes for most of the larger pots, the only difference is they take much longer to empty . We use some of the bigger pots for elephant ears and we take the bulbs in for planting next year along with the cannas.

The pots are cleaned out with clorox to kill bio organisms and they are stored for next season. We have quite a collection of pots and it would be a waste to let them break.