I don't really remember the places I read but ilgm is one place and royal seeds is another as I was wondering if taller skinnier pots would be better or shorter wider pots so I started reading up on it the last few days.
Deep or Wide Pots?
- Thread starter Waiakeauka
- Start date
PadawanWarrior
Well-Known Member
Well that is disappointing.
twentyeight.threefive
Well-Known Member
TMI chart looks like VPD chart.
twentyeight.threefive
Well-Known Member
But honestly, it's not the size of the pot it's how you use it.
PadawanWarrior
Well-Known Member
Funny, but ironically it's also true.
Faceless#1
Active Member
Last year I was wondering the same thing so I experimented with 14 outdoor plants. I used 55 gallon drums. 6 of them I cut a 10" hole in the side of the drum, drilled 100+ 1/8 inch holes in the opposite side and screwed 2x4's onto them to make them a stand that kept them 2' off the ground to avoid bugs and pest. I used sticky traps all the way up the 2x4's. They kinda looked like saw horses.
Then I took another six 55 gallon drums, drilled 100+ holes in the bottoms and cut 10" holes in the tops. I screwed 4 blocks of wood to the bottom of the barrels and set them on stands made with 2x4's that reassembled a stool with a hole in the middle for proper drainage.
I then put 3" of pea stone gravel in the bottoms and filled them with my special soil, added the plants and put them in the same area.
I made sure to use EXACTLY the same amount of water/nutes/mycrobes the whole grow.
I also did 3 different training methods on 12 of the 14 plants.
I left 1 plant in a horizontal barrel and 1 plant in a vertical barrel alone besides basic pruning and tied the tips down.
I cut the top on 2 horizontal barrel and 2 vertical barrels .
I fim'd( only cut 75% of the top) 2 vertical and 2 horizontal barrels.
I lollipop'd 2 horizontal and 2 vertical barrels.
The reasoning behind trying the different pruning techniques was to find which works best in each scenario.
The high times article you read is accurate. The plants in the wide but shallow horizontal barrels grew wider.
The plants in the deep but narrow vertical barrels grew taller.
This is where it gets interesting. Using fim or topping techniques makes a bushier plant, so does the wide but shallow pots. What ended up happening is they became too bushy and produced a very large amount of small popcorn bugs and everything on the lower half of the plants were so crappy I had no choice but to make edibles with it.
The plants that I lollipop'd in the horizontal barrels produced several nice cola's but the total yield was shit.
However, the plant that I just left alone in a horizontal barrel grew tall and bushy with a combination of long, beautiful outdoor buds. The cola's were all 8"+
Now the deep but narrow vertical barrels... Every pruning technique produced far more yield and a better quality yield in the deep barrels than the plants in the shallow, wide horizontal barrels.
The Topped plants in the vertical barrels produced easily twice as much as the topped plants in the horizontal barrels.
The fim'd plants in the vertical barrels were bushy and tall. They had nice cola's but the rest of the bud was nothing fancy.
The lollipop'd plants in the vertical barrels produced the biggest cola's I've ever had but the total yield proved to not be worth the effort.
Once again the best performing plant in the vertical barrel was the one I didn't use any kind of pruning technique on, instead I used a training method of tying the top down. This far out performed everything else. The lower branches all grew to be just about equal height and all produced big cola's with decent lower buds.
Once the season was over I inspected the root systems. The plants in the vertical barrels grew their roots almost all the way to the bottom and to the sides. The 2 lollipop'd plants in the vertical barrels had the least amount of roots. The fim'd has the most amount of roots.
The plants in the horizontal barrels grew to the bottom and wrapped around each other thru the rocks. Zero of the plants in the horizontal barrels grew to the far sides of the barrel. Therefore they didn't utilize all of the medium they were offered. Waste of space, time and soil.
To save some time V will stand for the vertical barrels and H will stand for the horizontal barrels in my chart below.
Barrel. Technique. Avg. Yield
V. Top'd. 700g
V. Fim'd. 625g
V. Loli'd. 450g
V. Trained. 870g
H. Top'd. 650g
H. Fim'd. 675g
H. Loli'd. 400g
H. Trained. 660g
So really what it comes down to is do you want a bunch of lighter, less dense popcorn bugs with short bushy plants( shallow but wide pots) that take up a lot more space or do you want taller plants with denser, full buds and nice cola's? ( Deep but narrow pots)
My conclusion, deeper is better. The buds were better, the root systems were better and it took up less space. The only issue I had with the vertical barrels, even tho they were heavy, was the wind. The plants grew to 6-8' tall and about 3-4' wide so they acted like a sail. I had to keep the soil wet on windy days or they would blow over even tho they easily weighed 400lbs+
This year I'm doing all vertical but with a modification to the stands I built for them. I am making the stands kinda cone shaped, like an Xmas tree stand. The legs will expand outward at a 45 degree angle and the total circumference will be wider than what the plant will grow to. Hope this helps someone.