smaller pots than soil???

[gaiusmarius]

thanx i planted in straight coco cause i dont like the perlite that they sell in the local stores shit is always floating to the top. guess i shouldnt have to water every day then huh?

no, for the beginning, you don't need to water every day. specially not with a seedling. let it establish it's roots well in the pot its in before you implement daily watering. not that it will not work, but it helps the plant make the roots quicker in the beginning if it has to go searching for water. as soon as you see it's no longer a weak seedling, but a young plant, then you can water more often.

 

[Guest]

got cha thanx

 

[Guest]

Mine is a coco mix in 1-Gallon pots

Mine is a coco mix in 1-Gallon pots

You can see in the picture, I use 1-Gallon pots filled with a coco mix with 30% perlite. Last go round I added perlite as a top dressing which ended up not being necessary. The difference in long fiber or short fiber coco makes a big difference. I could get away with watering every other day. I noticed that the more watered plants were bushier and much more stout. Since then I have watered every day after the plants are over 8 inches with 6 nodes. I use an air cooled 400 watt MH for vegging. The drier the mix gets, the more the plants seem to stretch taller.
At first I thought that I was getting faster growth. I hadn't topped or pruned anything at this point so I would measure each branches growth every day. Lots of tedious labor although I liked being with the plants. The quickest 3 were male and the other 4 were ladies. I wasn't more, It was just more verticle. I kept 1 on the, every other day watering schedule as long as I could. At the third week of budding it needed water every day. As soon as I treated It like the others it bushed out.
After the harvest I cleaned out my medium by removing the roots from it. The Plants root systems were suprisingly small. Not even close to being pot bound in a 1-Gallon pot. Coco is the way to go!
Now I am trying to get a soil taste out of tiny pots of coco.If you want to Check out this thread and my grow in my signature to see what info they have that you might find helpful.

 

[Protostele]

My pots hold about a gallon of coco mix. They are custom built with half inch hardware cloth and lined with landscape fabric. Four pots are fastened together into a rack using plastic cable ties and hardwood dowling for carrying handles. The handles also support the rack when placed in the growing room so the pots are suspended in air. Netpots fastened inside at the bottom finish off the racks.


I use clones and these Jack Herer plants were placed in 12/12 when they were 6 inches tall. I pruned for the first week of flower any side branches and though JH isn't recommended for SOG, I am pleased with this particular rack as the plants are 24 inches high with a 12 inch cola at day 48 of flower. They will go for 80 days so there should be a lot more fattening up. This has been a perpetual grow and I have been experimenting with vegging and pruning and just an inch or so makes a big difference. Seven to eight inch clones get too tall and I will continue to prune all side growth at least for a week in future.

Having fabric for pots encourages air exchange for the roots and since I do not get pot bound roots I think I am getting the air-pruning effect as described by Uncle Ben on OG. His method described using a copper based mixture to burn the root tips to encourage lateral growth but he did make mention of air-pruning having the same effect.

I can pull the coco filled fabric cylinder out of the hardware cloth pot after harvest and unroll the fabric to examine what is inside. Very few roots are visible coming out and running down the sides but if you shake the outter layer of coco off the roots you see a solid mass of fine lateral root growth.

another advantage of the hardware cloth pots are the many many conveniently located tie points.

As for watering, it has to be daily and at present I have it automatically drip three times during the day and then I do a manual water in the evening. At the manual watering I can decide whether to feed with nutrients or if the plants look well fed I can just apply water.

Just roughly figuring off the top of my head I would say each plant gets a half liter of liquid each day. Some of that is run to waste but not a lot.



Protostele

 

[gaiusmarius]

those are some real good looking ladies Protostele, it would be cool if you started a thread about your system. seems like you know how to make the coco dance

thanks for sharing man

 

[Guest]

Cloth pots?

Cloth pots?

I remember an article showing a grower called "little Big Way" who used something very similar to the hardware cloth pots. He has also won a few awards without ever checking the room temperatures with a thermometer!
He uses big homemade containers that breathe.
I would like to know what takes place when the roots get to the air at the sides & bottom of the pot? I wonder if it thinks it is at ground level and turn to keep growing?
Whatever it is, it seems to work very well.

 

[Protostele]

Gaius - Will do a thread later and hope I keep it updated better than I have previous threads...LOL. I just got a new computer and until I take the old hard drive and hook it up to the DVD connector to transfer my pictures over, I do not have access to my previous pictures. Can always take new ones I suppose, since it is currently a perpetual grow there is lots of opportunity to take pictures at every stage of the grow.

I am starting to get the hang of coco but habits are hard to break and I was treating the first racks like I did when growing in a bin. I also am very suspicious of the nutrients I was using at first and think they were out of date. No shelf life mentioned on the labels but the three part fertilizers were at least three years old.

I made the switch to Canna ferts when I learned that the same mix can be used for the whole grow. It makes it much easier when automatically dripping from one reservoir and feeding a perpetual grow with plants at varying stages of flowering. The pk 13/14 is applied during the manual evening feeding when appropriate. The plants are loving the canna much better than my previous fertilizer and after I get some more experience with this setup, then I will experiment some with organics again.

Incidently, this was my first attempt at a perpetual SOG and I was interested to see if it was more work or less work than raising the whole cabinet at once. I have decided it is more work but there are advantages as well. I will continue the perpetual SOG until I shut down operations for the summer but next fall I will revert back to doing whole grows together. When I retire in a few years then I will revisit this method again.

MikeyPDC - I saw an article in Cannabis Culture where someone made similar pots with hardware cloth, but I haven't been able to find that particular mag around the house lately. He liked the way it provided good air exchange but with coco it probably doesn't matter much because of coco's excellent properties. I like these pots as I was able to construct them to suit the cabinet I was using.

I think the root tips just dry up and die which encourages lateral root branching. There were very few roots visible at the outter edge of the coco, but just inside it was a mass of very fine roots.

Protostele

 

[Guest]

yo proto mos def u gotta make that DIY thread man