If your container plants have lost their lust for life and you want to do something about that, watch this video. Sloat Gardens is a 10-store California gardening chain operating in San Francisco, Marin, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties. Here an expert from Sloat Gardens reveals two products that are key to successful container gardening. A business-like presenter takes 2 mins, 54 seconds to impart this knowledge.

Whether you are planting veggies, herbs or color plants, use good potting soil and transfer the seedlings in their plugs to the container. Then you take something called Zeba (a cornstarch polymer tagged as “super absorbant granules”) on the box and put a little of it around the root zone of the plants – not too much. This retains moisture in the soil and breaks down in about a year. (You can also use Zeba when sowing seeds.)

After that you take a product called Sure Start (a kind of ancient fungal material with a scientific name I couldn’t quite catch) and put about a cup of it in the container. The Sloat Gardens representative swears by this product. She says that if you put two containers next to each other and treat one with Sure Start and the other one not, the difference is “like night and day”, with the Sure Start container doing much better, of course. “There is a symbiotic relationship between the Sure Start and the plant,” she says. “Sure Start encourages the plant to take up nutrients and water while the Sure Start draws some starch from the plant’s roots.”