After seeing this idea in various magazines and blogs, I finally decided to try it for myself.

Stacking pots is a super easy do-it-yourself project and adds a nice vertical element to any garden. All you need are pots of various sizes, a piece of rebar, potting soil, plants, and about an hour to spare.

How to Stack Pots

Rebar is available at most hardware stores. Make sure you get a piece long enough so that one to two feet of it can be driven into the ground for extra support. I bought a 72” long piece of ½” rebar and drove two feet into the ground with a hammer. This left me room to stack five terra-cotta pots of descending sizes, starting with a 14” pot on the bottom and ending with a 6” pot on top.

After playing around with different positions, I decided to angle the pots as I stacked them so that one side of each pot’s interior was leaning on the rebar. This increases the amount of plantable space versus stacking the pots straight, which was crucial since I just bought a 6-inch mum and flowering kale for this project. These plants would not even have fit into the 14-inch pot with a 12-inch pot stacked on top of it. I knew I should have stuck with the Pansies!

I feel like angling the pots is a bit more precarious than straight stacking them, but so far everything is holding up well.

This project is pretty easy to move after installation, but it’s always a good idea to pick the right spot the first time. For convenience I placed mine in a partially shaded bed near my rain barrel. Blister beetles came through earlier this year and destroyed my Japanese Anemone, so the stacked pots are filling a vacant spot normally occupied by that enormous plant.

Best Plants for Stacking

I used four 3-inch Geraniums (discount bin annuals), two 2-inch Italian Large Leaf Basil plants (lime green foliage), two 2-inch Bronze Fennel plants (airy purple foliage), four 4-inch Coleus (two Henna and two Rustic Orange), one 6-inch Regal Purple Mum, and one 6-inch Nagoya Red Flowering Kale.

For a more whimsical look, you could use brightly colored pots instead of plain old terra cotta, or make your own color scheme by painting terra cotta pots in whatever colors speak to you. I also saw a really cute picture of three straight stacked pots on a front porch that had the words “Home Sweet Home” stenciled on them. They used wider pots for stability, since you can’t drive rebar into your porch (duh).

Anyways, I would also stick with plants that are in 4-inch pots or smaller for this project. It was a little difficult to cram in the mum and kale.

Water slowly to avoid washing soil over the edge of the pots.