Hello, I'm Richard from Time Valley Aquatics and today I'm going to show you how to pot up aquatic plants for the pond. First of all you'll need a perforated basket, coming a variety of sizes, this is the most common one, 11cm square, you can get big round ones, kidney shape ones, all of that lot. And for this demonstration we're just going to pot up one marginal in a small pot. You need gravel also and your aquatic plant. This one is water mint, I'm using this one because it's a very easy one to pot up. As you can see it's got a lot of roots on it. And all you do, you find a piece that's grown pretty well, snap a bit off, that's one plant. You'll also need some compost, this is just ordinary cheap garden compost, hasn't got a very high nutrient content so it shouldn't make the pond go green, it's nice and easy, fluffy, good to work with. So all you do is fill your pot about 20mm, 3-4 inch from the top. Next thing is you poke a hole, one plant, two, three. Then you add a little bit more compost. You then press it down, just to secure the cuttings that you've put in. So it should look something a little bit like that, there's three plants. And then all you do is you add a little bit of gravel. The gravel prevents the compost floating out of the pot when you put the pot in the water. It's always best to put it into the water slowly to allow the compost to absorb water. Otherwise if you just dump it in, it'll go bloop and the hole will just end up on the bottom of your pond. If you've got a pond, some of your plants may have self-seeded, you may have seedlings that you've taken on in little pots, they need to go into bigger pots, I've got that situation here. This is a skunk cabbage, it doesn't look like much but it grows into quite a big plant so it needs to be in a reasonable sized pot. This is what a skunk cabbage looks like when it's older. So therefore it needs to be in a big pot. First job is to remove a plant from the small pot so by working along the edges of the pot, squeezing it gently, you can loosen the soil. This should allow the plant to come out easily. The next stage is to select the size of pot that you want. These ones are going in the shop so they don't want to be in massive pots so I'm putting it in a 19cm square pot. It's quite shallow, it's not really suitable for the plant when it's in its full size but as space is limited at work, we need to put them in a reasonable sized pot so they'll do quite well to the point of seal where people can take them out the pot and then plant them in the garden. So the first thing you need to do is put a little bit of compost in the bottom of your pot. Just like that. Add your plant, gently break up the soil and fill all around with compost. No matter what plant you pot in up, it's very important to leave the soil. No matter what plant you pot in up, it's very important to leave the growing points of the plant, where the leaves are coming from, where the new growth is coming through. You need to leave that free of compost. You don't want to cover it over because the plant might find it hard to grow through and by leaving it open, it gets the air on it, it gets sunlight and encouraging it to grow. Last thing to do is to top the pot off with gravel, same as we did with the other one and it's ready to go. Here's a quick example of what to do with an iris. The iris is going mad and you're pond, you've decided to bite it up. It's quite easy to pull it apart so you're left with huge roots, dead growth and the new growth here. First thing you want to do is take off the old growth, no need for that. Next thing you want to do is remove any of the excess soil and muck from the roots. Take care not to damage the roots too much. Next step is to select the pot. This one is for retail sales so it wants to be in a reasonable size pot but not too big. So it looks nice. If you're ponding it in your pond, you'd probably want a little bit bigger than this, maybe the 23cm square pot with a little bit more depth for the roots because they do get quite a lot of roots on. So once you've repaired your plant, you just pot it up in exactly the same way as I've shown you. Some plants may require divide and up, for instance a lily. With lilies you tend to find that if they've been in your pond for a number of years, then there'll be many, many roots, very thick, often as thick as your arm, with lots of little lilies growing out of them. You need to cut them at a certain point. With lilies it's not just a simple matter of pulling the plant apart, like it is with a lot of the marginals. You need to cut the root at a certain point if you want to divide the plant up and put it into pots. So here's a lily here. You can see there's one, two plants. So between this plant and this plant, you would cut. We've now got two lilies and you can pot these up in exactly the same way as we did with the skunk cabbage. Making sure that there's plenty of gravel over the top of the pot because once the pot is on the bottom of your pond, the buoyancy effect of any compost will be exaggerated and bump the whole lot could just rise to the top. By putting plenty of gravel on and lowering it in gently and slowly you minimize that chance. Before dividing any plant you've got to make sure that there's plenty of roots to support both plants. If there isn't, it's best to keep it as one plant and move it into a bigger pot. When you divide it or add new plants to your pond, always check that you plant them at the right depth. The labels will have suggested planting depths on. If you're not looking enough to have labels with them, if you want to be a local aquatic shop and they can advise you. As long as you know what the plant's called, they should know what depth it has to be planted at. Here's an example using some mimulus of just how quick it is to pot up an aquatic plant. A little bit of gravel on, it's ready to go in the pond. The best time of the year to pot aquatic plants up is either in the autumn, just after you've cut the plants back for the winter, divide them up then. You know exactly what plants they are because you've just cut them back. You've taken all the dead or dying foliage off. You can pot them up, leave them in your pond, they're ready for the next year and they can come away again. Or in the spring, when all the plants are starting to come back up again, you can identify the plant.