starting autos in a one gal pot?

I messed up my first attempt at autos, and I do believe that you are supposed to leave them in the pot they will finish in...so if you want one in a 5 gallon start it in the 5 gallon...I disregarded all that helpful info and started them in solo cups and from the solo cups I try to go to the pot they will finish in...Anyway next autos I start will be started in 3 or 5 gallon depending on what i have available at the time, and then I will leave them alone...my first one dealt with some heinous things, and her yield was laughable...just pointless, and it looked like a good bit, but I needed her for seed, so she was mostly seed anyway, but still...pitiful...but I messed her up early on...moving pots was only one thing...lol.

When any of my plants are in solo cups i find it easier to just bottomfeed them...and...I grabbed my little bowl I was watering them in and put the plant in and then started pouring water from my spray bottle, but Oh No..wrong spray bottle...that wasn't pH'ed water...it was straight undiluted freaking lysol!!!! OMG OMG...so I run over and start rinsing out the whole bottom of the cup because it was just a second that it set there in the lysol so it couldn't have soaked up much..anyway I rinse it off really really well, and then smell the bottom of the cup and it does indeed smell like lysol, so I figure an immediate transplant is needed...and really it was needed, but now all the dirt in the cup is wet...so I take the plant out and only tear a few little roots off near the very bottom which I figured is alright, since they would have been the ones to get the lysol...anyway so now I am holding a dirt mess of 4 inch plant, and am just like oh no...I don't have any pots in here...I was not planning on transplanting...anyway so I am looking around looking around and I see that I can get to my bag of soil that is in the closet, so I just set the plant in the bag of soil, while I can get a pot ready...so I go get the pot and grab the soil and dump it in, and then I am like where is the plant? OMG OMG OMG I have now buried it under all the other soil...!!!???!!!! So, I dig her back out and find that only one leaf was broken...so I just plant her back on top of the soil and that was that...she was kinda weird to begin with since she was a 2 header right out of the seed...so she is already shorter than the others her age because her whole main stalk almost is split into 2...she split on her own right after the cotyledons..her first little pointy leaves instead of 2 normal sized seedling leaves she had 4 small leaves and 2 branches...anyway...after all this her leaves never even yellowed of anything..she continued right along....but as I said the yield was really low, but I was really expecting it...so anyway...my advice is to put them where you are going to finish them so it is easier and you never accidentally bury them or some weird shit like what I did...lol

good post poly. you are exactly right about them wanting to spread out in that larger pot. we actually just use our 5 gallon pots filled about 7/8's full of FFOF. no transplanting no hassle and really huge plants (most of the time). Plants don't like their roots cramped for the most part. easily 1-3oz off of them (never less than an oz though.)

polyarcturus said:

i use 4x4 pots then 1 gal pots for photo period plants in sog setup. the 1 gal are plenty big enough if your going straight into flower as soon as you put them in if i was gonna veg and flower to the end i would use a 3 gal pot because when you flower those roots that have been vegging in a 1 gal are gonna spread quick in the 3 gal you have a chance of the root not getting to far before flowering

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transplanting causes stress. I use a 6 inch for seedslings until root groth is prolific and then i just plant in 3 gallon. you want to cause your plants as little stress as you can

Ive read that its kind of pointless to put auto flowers in 5 gallon pots. Gallon for every month it grows. 3 gallons work great, laaate

yeah forsure. I dont know why people buy regs. fem takes out all the guess work

they dont get root bound in 5 gallons. its just a waste of space, they dont need 5 gallon. 3 gallons work fine.