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| | | Home»Different Watering Techniques - II |
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| | | | Different Watering Techniques - II | | | | | |
| Different Watering Techniques - II
To Choose Pots
Once the media is at field capacity, water will only disappear through dehydration, from the top of the pot, or by removal by the roots. If none of these happens, the container stays wet. Dehydration, especially in highly moisture retentive growing media, is a very slow process. So pot size may be important for the plants at various growth stages to ensure the root size is comparable to the soil volume.
The roots should be able to remove sufficient moisture in a relatively short time from the growing media.
Small seedlings can successfully be grown in small plugs and should only be transplanted into larger cell packs once the roots are capable of holding the entire root ball together.
Height of Containers
A physical phenomenon comes into picture called water table, whenever growing media is placed in a pot and watered.
Water will drain from the growing media through gravitational forces, but due to the cohesive properties of water, the pore spaces at the bottom of the mixture will always remain saturated with water.
Only air porosity (the type of growing media, and how loosely it is packed in the container) will determine how much water is retained. This will happen in all containers, and it is not determined by the amount of drainage holes, in fact the container may not even have a bottom.
Irrespective of container height the size of the water table will be the same. In fact, in smaller containers (plug trays) the water saturation will represent a much larger portion of the entire containers capacity. Since most seeds require quite moist conditions to germinate, so this can be beneficial but water frequency should be less than in larger pots.
Methods of Watering
Watering methods can broadly be divided into two types: top watering or bottom watering. Top watering is done by pouring water on top of the soil and let it drain through to the bottom whereas Bottom watering involves standing pots in a pot of water and allow the capillary forces to pull up moisture to the top of the soil surface.
Top watering will ensure that all growing medium is thoroughly wet even in tall containers (higher than 6") and can be the preferred method for watering plants with primarily surface roots (tuberous begonias, for example). When this watering type is practiced, care should be taken to avoid wetting the foliage which can lead to disease development. Molds may also start to grow on the surface of the media. After water has drained, the pot's saucer should be emptied to avoid standing water.
Bottom watering uses capillary action to pull water up from below. Just as much air is pulled into the growing medium as with top watering, and bottom watering it is actually better at maintaining air porosity. This method is usually the preferred watering method for home growers as it is easy to add water to the bottom of a tray and you avoid washing away young seedlings. Sufficient time should be given for capillary motion and the saucer only removed when the surface turns from a dark brown color to black and starts to glisten.
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