Best pots for autos

[BII]

- Root pruning air-pots. Love the performance but hate using them. Difficult to water, loads of leaking through the openings. Hate the mess they make. It is impossible to give a good drench and typically that ends up making the grower underwater to avoid the mess

I disagree about difficulties watering Air-Pots. If you set them up right (50/50 chance; so the top has the 2 closed/sealed rows of humps, so simply can't leak at the top 2 rows) and when initially filling with soil/medium make sure to press the soil/medium at/into the sides a few inches down - that is, just do the minimum to make sure you're well sealed at the top of the pots - I've never had problems.

But you can get side leakage with Air-Pots, if you water too aggressively, if you just pour a lot in the same one spot at once, from a height, etc. such that the water makes/digs a channel for itself through your medium. Just avoid dumping a lot at once in the same spot. I'm sure that's good advice with any medium/soil.

 

[Digitalsc4rz]

I'm using square plastic 11ltr pots at the moment, but wanted to try something else as a experiment

Here is my take on it, having done almost everything in these past 10 years as a grower. From DWC/RDWC, coco, soil, top feed, bottom feed, run-to-waste, mapito, organic etc ... I think the only I've never done is NFT and aeroponics.

- Round plastic pots - tried and tested, they work

- Root pruning air-pots. Love the performance but hate using them. Difficult to water, loads of leaking through the openings. Hate the mess they make. It is impossible to give a good drench and typically that ends up making the grower underwater to avoid the mess

- Fabric - horrible when using coco/mapito and hydro nutes. Major salt build-up on the fabric that is near impossible to clean and burns roots. Also, easy to attract negative fungal activity, unless you have a rigid inter-crop cleaning/sterilisation procedure. Hard to give a good drench without water shooting out the sides just like air-pots. Never tried using organics though, may try it one day when doing outdoor, never indoors. Reason is, I freak out moving plants around/training. Feel like l disrupt the soil/root system too much as the fabric pot is not rigid

- Squared pots - What I am using currently and liking the best. I can bring plant closer together (as opposed to round pots) and easier to train them indoors. The root bound argument doesn't convince me at all. I feel no decline in performance compared to round pots.

Depends on your setup I would say. I am definitely partial to fabric pots for obvious reasons, just that indoors managing a tight spot needing to move plants around and training them, I'm not a huge fan. However, there are lots of dudes and dudettes out there who are happy training plants with fabric pots. I've been known to try it too, but snapped some branches when attempting to move plants around.

My 0.02c
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[Groff]

I disagree about difficulties watering Air-Pots. If you set them up right (50/50 chance; so the top has the 2 closed/sealed rows of humps, so simply can't leak at the top 2 rows) and when initially filling with soil/medium make sure to press the soil/medium at/into the sides a few inches down - that is, just do the minimum to make sure you're well sealed at the top of the pots - I've never had problems.

But you can get side leakage with Air-Pots, if you water too aggressively, if you just pour a lot in the same one spot at once, from a height, etc. such that the water makes/digs a channel for itself through your medium. Just avoid dumping a lot at once in the same spot. I'm sure that's good advice with any medium/soil.

Sure, plus if you use a surfactant it also helps massively. I've used air-pots extensively in the past, and they're great, don't get me wrong. Triple so if you use a drip system. However, if you are doing lots of plants and have limited time per day to tend to the plants, then I dont recommend them. They're a pain to just go in and drench with feed, you need to go slow and steady. If I had 4 plants, sure... doing 16 plants like I'm doing now, not so much.

Again, not saying they're bad at all, quite on the contrary. Only arguing they're not going to be the limiting factor to growing great plants.
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[BII]

Yes, I agree, Air-Pots with automatic feed, such as Blumats, (or otherwise less work) could be an ideal setup.

Or what I'm trying now, Air-Pot Hempy pots or variations, might be considered. I put a round plastic food storage container that just fits at the bottom of #3/yellow base Air-Pots, fill that with perlite and a little vermiculite, and fill the rest with the usual coco/perlite. So far, grow results seem to be the same, but with the Hempy pot reservoir I now only water 2x/week and even then the pots remain heavy compared to running them normally.

 

[Capt.Quirk]

I epoxied a flex oil spout on my water jug, for better reach and flow control and have no problems with either.

 

[jdm61]

So what did the rain science bags do for you that the regular cloth pots don’t?

Welcome to Rain Science Grow Bags

High Times "Hot Products" March 2020 High Yield Technology

rainsciencegrowbags.com

 

[jdm61]

I thought you meant that you Put a fabric pot inside of the rain science bags. LOL you don’t do that, do you?

I believe in @Rain Science bags over conventional fabric pots and airpots. But this round I’m using the square plastic pots that came with the autopots but I’ll be rearranging some 3 gal round bags to fit the square base of the 2 easy 2 grow system.

 

[jdm61]

So I’m wondering how that rain science 20 x 44 rectangular raised bed might work in a 2 x 4 or perhaps even better a 2 1/2 x 5 tent?

 

[Mizzo81]

I thought you meant that you Put a fabric pot inside of the rain science bags. LOL you don’t do that, do you?

No

 

[Sleeper143]

So I’m wondering how that rain science 20 x 44 rectangular raised bed might work in a 2 x 4 or perhaps even better a 2 1/2 x 5 tent?

My first thought with that is it would be good if you planted one plant at one end, you could LST it all the way along the length of the bed!

I’m not sure I’d plant two or more plants in it though- sometimes different plants (even if they are the same strain) might need different feeds depending on their needs. That could be difficult if they share a pot/bed. Also how easy would it be to move around with multiple plants in? Sometimes you want to rotate s plant or move it to a different position in your tent. That could be a problem in a bed like this. Just my 2cents :smoking: