For plants that mean to stay.
Plants Succulents
Echeveria, Haworthia, Sedum, Aloe, Sansevieria and the string-of things. A hole, a tray, and a pot that is not swimming in itself.
2 pieces
Every one printed to order in Yerevan at the size you ask for. Tap a code, send a photo of the plant and the pot it is in now, and a size comes back the same day.
The pan, at a 0.49 height-to-width ratio. A rosette sits on it rather than in it, and the roots, which spread rather than dive, get width instead of a column of wet soil underneath.
200 mm across, 98 mm tall. Holds 1.75 litres. Rim diameter from 160 to 300 mm.
The column, for Aloe, Sansevieria, Zamioculcas and anything tall enough to tip a pan over. Depth here is ballast as much as root run.
140 mm across, 192 mm tall. Holds 1.75 litres. Rim diameter from 100 to 220 mm.
Start from this drawing and change everything
The editor opens on our shape for a succulent: the proportion, the drainage and whether there is a reservoir at all are already set the way this page argues for. Then every slider moves. Worth changing for a succulent:
We make these and they are good pieces. They are not for this plant, and here is the reason in each case.
These are the figures the pieces are drawn to rather than measurements taken off a finished one, and they are a starting point for your plant rather than a rule. Send us what it is in now and we will move them.
Half to two thirds mineral, same family as a cactus mix but you can be a little kinder to the soft-leaved ones. Haworthia and Echeveria will take more organic matter than an Astrophytum will, and they will still rot if the pot stays wet, so the extra kindness goes into the feed and not into the drainage.
Top dress with the same grit you mixed in. It keeps the lowest leaves off wet soil, which is where the rot on a rosette almost always starts, and it stops the surface caking in a dry room.
Most rosette succulents root out sideways in the top few centimetres. Put one in a deep pot and the bottom two thirds is soil the plant never enters, which stays wet long after the top is dry. Under the surface that looks like nothing at all. Above it, months later, it looks like a plant that suddenly fell over.
So the pan pot is short on purpose. The ratio is the product: ask us to make it deeper and you are asking for the column pot instead, which we also make.
Sansevieria, Zamioculcas, Dracaena and Aloe are sold as easy, and what that actually means is drought tolerant. They are heavy and top-lofted, and a shallow pan under a metre of Sansevieria is a pot on the floor. Those go in the column, where the depth is doing two jobs: root run, and not tipping over when the cat leans on it.
Zamioculcas in particular has water-storing rhizomes that will happily sit in a dry pot for two months. Watering it on a schedule is how most of them die.
Soak, drain, empty the tray, wait until the pot is light. In summer that is roughly weekly in a bright window; in winter it is far less and a Haworthia on a cold sill can go six weeks without complaint.
A shrivelled leaf recovers in a day. A soft translucent one does not recover at all. When you are unsure, the mistake to make is the dry one.