Hypertufa

Hypertufa is a type of concrete made with portland cement, peat moss, and perlite/vermiculite. People often use it to make pots for plants as it, I think, absorbs water well and has a nice aesthetic look. My partner and I made a couple hypertufa pots sometime in 2020/2021.

A small hypertufa pot we made. I can’t remember what kind of plant this is, but we got it at Sloat Garden Center in SF.

What you need

Normal concrete is cement + aggregates (usually sand and gravel). Hypertufa substitutes perlite/vermiculite for the gravel and peat moss for the sand. Here’s the list again:

We got all this stuff at Lowes (whose website also has a pretty good tutorial on hypertufa). I also totally forget the proportions, but we looked up a YouTube video1 when we made it.

Thoughts

I totally like the hypertufa aesthetic and the ability to make any shape and size you want. One mistake we made, though, is that for our larger pot we used a cardboard mold, which didn’t hold its shape too well. Our pot ended up rounder than we’d have liked.

There’s also a fear that the cement in hypertufa may have a negative effect on plants, due to cement being a base/having a high pH. We tried to offset this by soaking our finished hypertufa pots in vinegar, which caused them to foam a bit. Not sure if this helped anything, or if the pots instead took on a high acidity value.

Hypertufa is pretty cheap to make. 25 pounds of portland cement at Lowe’s was something like $5. I think the perlite and vermiculite ingredients were around $13 each (but I may be misremembering). We ended up with a lot of leftover portland cement that we haven’t done much with afterward. Maybe at some point we’ll try making “papercrete” or just normal concrete things.

References