| | | Various Potting Techniques - II | | | | | |
| Various Potting Techniques - II
Filling up of Plug Trays or Flats.
The above procedure should be used when plug trays, flats, or small pots are prepared for seed sowing. In small containers the effects of compaction is often much worse than in larger containers.
To provide a sturdy surface for the seeds, you can gently depress the surface of the growing media with your thumb, but be careful not to compact the media too deeply. These small seeds need to be surface sown as they do not have enough energy to grow up from cavities between growing media. This firming of the surface is important especially when sowing very fine seeds, like begonias or carrots.
Re-potting to larger pots.
The tapping procedure is recommended, even when transplanting to larger containers and pots. Traditional advice called for using your thumbs to depress the growing mix along the rim of the container when transplanting, presumably to ensure good root contact with the soil. However, as packing growing media too tightly into a container can significantly reduce the number of large pores which again reduces the all important air porosity, So this advice turned out to be counter productive.
Fill the empty cavity inside the rim of the pot with moist growing media and tap the container on the potting beach as above.
Drainage Improvement.
A piece of advice, which has been repeated so often that it almost sounds like a law, is to place some coarser material in the bottom of a pot to improve drainage.
Unfortunately, this advice is not correct. In fact, it will actually have the complete opposite effect. A water table will be created reducing the air porosity, where the two media types meet, the water molecules will hold together through cohesion. This leads to the growing media becoming even more soaked, or "shortening the height" of the pot. Use a uniform growing media throughout the entire pot but choose it carefully.
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