A popular viral hack suggests you pad the bottom of your large planter with a foam pool noodle. Their malleable nature makes them easy to form into the shape of the planter.
We purchased two 8-quart bags of potting mix, two pool noodles, and two 2.5-quart live Aubrieta flowers from Walmart. For our planter, we used a 14-inch half-whisky barrel planter.
We gathered our supplies on our concrete patio and added gardening gloves, a watering can, and scissors. We rinsed our planter and took the tags off the pool noodles.
We created a wide pretzel shape with the noodle before pressing it down into the bottom of the pot. Because our noodles were skinny, we stacked a second one to fill more space.
We filled the pot with soil, added the plants, and placed more soil around the base of the stems to cover the noodles and roots. We watered until it seeped from the drainage hole.
In addition, replacing some of the soil with foam makes pots much easier to move around and keeps water retention to a minimum, which helps to prevent root rot.