Ordering
A photograph of the plant, and one number.
The number is the diameter of the pot it is standing in right now. With those two things a vessel can be sized properly, including the awkward diameters nobody stocks. If you would rather set the numbers yourself, the editor does that and hands you a file; either way the order finishes in a message thread with a person in it.
What to put in the first message
A photograph and a diameter is a complete enquiry. Everything below is what turns a size into the right size.
- A photograph of the plant Whole plant, in its current pot, from about a metre away. Leaf size relative to pot size says more about how root bound it is than any measurement you could send, and it is also how a plant gets identified when nobody remembers what it was labelled.
- The diameter of the pot it is in now Measured across the top, inside the rim, in millimetres. If it is a nursery pot with a number moulded into the base, that number will do. This is the one figure that cannot be guessed from a photograph.
- Where it is going to live A windowsill has a depth, a shelf has a height, and a floor has neither. Send the tightest dimension of the spot, because a vessel that is three millimetres too deep for the sill is a vessel on the floor.
- How long you are away for This is the one people do not think to mention and it changes the whole vessel. A reservoir is sized in days, and a fortnight away in July is a different job from a long weekend in October.
Where it is made
Designed, printed, finished and packed in one building in Yerevan. The drawing and the printer are in the same room, so an odd diameter is a change to a number rather than a change to a mould.
Where it goes
Anywhere in Armenia, posted from Yerevan and tracked. Outside Armenia it gets arranged in the thread, one order at a time: a 190 gram table vessel and a 910 gram floor vessel are not the same parcel and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.
What happens after you send it
The size, the reservoir volume and the days it should hold come back with the drawing, and nothing is printed until you have looked at them. Printing and finishing then take six to twelve days depending on the vessel, and a floor vessel is at the long end of that because there is simply more of it.
A first one can be wrong. A root ball can turn out to be wider than its pot suggested, and the answer to that is a second print at the corrected diameter rather than a conversation about tolerances. Every approved size stays on file, so the second vessel for the same shelf is one message.
Pottery is older than farming, the Armenian version of a pot lives in the floor, and a printed vessel does not shatter in a suitcase.
What a potting mix is measured onPorosity, container capacity and bulk density, with measured values for peat, coir, bark, perlite, pumice and the rest.