Hi, my name is Peggy Robertson on behalf of Expert Village.com.
I am going to talk to you in this clip today about pea gravel. Now, pea gravel is just a bunch of really tiny stones that are used to put in the bottom of a pot that has no hole in it to lift the level of the dirt. So that when you put your plant in, it is not sitting right at the bottom of the pot right in the water. We have a level maybe half-inch of pea gravel under it. When you put your plant on it the roots will stay in the dirt and the pea gravel is where all that extra water is going to go to so your plant won't be sitting in it and its roots won't get all rotted and swollen and the poor plant won't die.
Now pea gravel is just a bunch of little stones. You can buy them at a hardware store, go to a garden center and get them in a bag. You don't want to just dig stones up out of your yard because if you do that you are going to get insect eggs, going to get dirt and you might get a fungus or something else that comes with it. The stones when you do buy them they have been commercially washed and sanitized and it's really not any particular type of a stone, just small stones.
Now if you don't want to use small stones you can use slightly larger stones. The whole idea is to get a level of stones under the plant itself between the bottom of the pot and the dirt for the excess water to sit into so the plant does not rot in its own water.