How to age new terracotta pots

Make your new pots match your old ones. By Ann Marie Powell

Although new terracotta can look smart, it can look out of kilter with the mellow tones of old clay containers covered in lichen.

The quickest way to age terracotta is to paint the pots with farmyard manure diluted with water - or, perhaps more easy to find in towns, with natural yogurt.

Use a stiff brush to rub on an even coating over the surface and into the rim before planting pots up, since dry, empty pots will absorb the solution better than ones full of damp compost. Soon your pots will be attracting algae, followed by lichens, then mosses.

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