Questions about growing autos outdoors in pots

[Humanrob]

I've been growing autos outdoors in the ground for a few years. Oddly, I treat them very similarly to how I used to grow photos outdoors, and they've done great. This winter I did my first autos indoors, tried to grow them similarly to how I grew my photos indoors, and I nearly killed them. I haven't entirely wrapped my brain around that yet, in short; I understand how overfeeding the indoor ones negatively impacted them, what I don't get is how consistently overfeeding the outdoor ones hasn't phased them. Is it just a matter of them being in the ground?

This summer I'm going to grow 4 plants in the ground as I've been doing, and my brother (whose property gets way more sun than mine) is going to grow 4 more for me. He lives far enough away that I might not see him between when I drop them off and when I pick them up again at the end of the summer. I'm going to need to bring them to him already established in their final pots, and have it be as "plug and play" as possible. My limited, albeit indoor, recent experience of growing autos in pots makes me nervous about this.

How do you go about growing autos outdoors in pots? What has worked for you and what hasn't?

Thanks in advance ---

 

[Northergreen]

Growing in ground vs pots ...
Pots can't leach away nutes like growing in the ground.
Think about it like this..you put a drop of food coloring in a bucket of water and it stays within the vessel. Nowhere to go and stays more concentrated .
Put that same drop of food coloring in a 27 foot pool and it will disperse until you don't see it anymore.
Having done both , I barely feed autos in pots. And still only do half feed amount on the ones in ground unless the " tell " me they need more

 

[Humanrob]

So it turned out I had no issues growing outdoors in pots this year. I did notice some things...

None of the plants regardless of of pot size were anywhere near root bound, while they had all found the edges of the pots, most had relatively small root balls compared with the amount of soil they were in. That said, the plants in bigger pots tended to grow bigger, and the ones in wider pots tended to grow wider. So there seems to be a correlation with pot size and plant size/shape, and it's not a matter of running out of resources (i.e. actual nutrients), it seems to be tied to the plants... uh... "perception" of it's potential. Or maybe akin to fish, there is some internal limiting factor that prevents them from getting too big for their "tank".

Still looking for the sweet spot with pot size, but I'll lean toward too big rather than too small moving forward.