Low-effort impact

By offering Eckert’s hanging baskets to its customers, Urban Growers Greenhouse is able to provide municipalities with a labor-saving solutions that help plants look their best. The Burton, Ohio, grower supplies cities all over the state with 16-inch Weekender and 23-inch H2O Labor Saver hanging baskets, allowing city staff to water every two to three days instead of daily.

“They’re not cheap, but the payback is good,” says John Urbanowicz, owner of Urban Growers Greenhouse, which has been using the baskets for about five years. “The plants just seem to do really well in them.”

The design of the Weekender and H2O Labor Saver baskets not only saves on watering time, the reservoir and wick combination keeps plants from sitting in water, preventing root rot and disease for a healthier, more beautiful plant. That’s especially important when it comes to watering large hanging baskets.

“When you’re watering big baskets up on poles, you’re just soaking the soil. You’re flooding it,” Urbanowicz says. “But with the Weekender product, you water it from above and the excess water just goes into the overflow, so the soil mass isn’t always just soaking in water.”

And for the grower, storing is a breeze since the baskets are easy to stack and long-lasting. The majority of municipalities Urban Growers has converted to Eckert’s baskets had been using wire baskets with coir liners in the past, which needed to constantly be replaced.

“The wire baskets get beat up and they’re hard to store. So on our end, since we’re doing a large quantity, those wire baskets get beat up and then everybody sends them back to us and they never stack on a pallet. They’re falling all over the place,” Urbanowicz says.

But with Eckert’s baskets, customers can just dump them out at the end of the season, palletize them and send them back to Urban Growers. The containers are guaranteed for 10 years, and most of them last even longer than that, Urbanowicz says. “They’re really made to go three seasons. If you want to do an early spring planting, you can do that and then summer, and then we have done a couple this season for fall,” he says. “Some people even do Christmas baskets in them. That’s how durable the baskets are.”