Watering

When I am watering am I trying to completely saturate the soil (using cloth bags) completely and evenly throughout or am I watering enough to give her a good drink? I am using a 3gal pot and I can put in 1 gal (which is where i started) with 0 runoff or I can do 1.5 gal and get a little bit of runoff. I overwatered a week or 2 ago and I think it comes from I give them too much water at once. I hear that's not possible if using cloth pots but I think that when I give her 1.5 that the soil gets too wet and takes too long to dry out ... ~4-5 days.... and I should just stick with 1 gal per water/feeding and water every ~3-4 days. With her taking 4-5 days to dry out and water again i think that may have caused my overwatering issues? I have only watered her 2x in the past 12 days. I let it dry out for a week after overwatering, gave her a good solid 1.5 gal and then waited 5 days to water again.

50/50 FFOF FFHF - no pearlite added (oops).

ty!

Always water to a little runoff to ensure the medium is saturated uniformly, no dry spots. Water to more run off, and work in a plain watering if using salt nutrients. You don't want to leave the tap roots dry for too long at the bottom of the pot. It will take longer in-between watering when the plants are small. As they mature you will find they require quite a bit more, and more often

From my understanding, over watering comes from watering too often and leaving the roots constantly in swampy soil. I don't think you can really give too much volume in any container with good drainage; it's frequency that seems to be the problem.

I don't need to give nearly that much water in Happy Frog before I get runoff in 3gal fabric pots. Rarely need to put more than half gallon in before runoff.

Fangthane said:

From my understanding, over watering comes from watering too often and leaving the roots constantly in swampy soil. I don't think you can really give too much volume in any container with good drainage; it's frequency that seems to be the problem.

I don't need to give nearly that much water in Happy Frog before I get runoff in 3gal fabric pots. Rarely need to put more than half gallon in before runoff.

Click to expand...

I water slowly and let it soak in. I have noticed mine gets really dry and repels water. If i just dump in a half gal of water real quick of course I'll get runoff and it'll be from the sides because the water just runs right out.

Maybe i need to water faster? I'd imagine even if i miss a spot or 2 inside the soil that the water will distribute evenly throughout (or close to) over the next 12 hours or so.....

You will need to use a surfactant. It will help the water absorb into the medium. Few drops of liquid dish soap will help. Definitely water slowly and allow the soil time to absorb the water.

dunno how helpful or harmful, but when i used fabric pots i noticed mine kept getting hydrophobic too. i added a drop of dawn to each gallon of water, it makes the water wetter weirdly, i would also slide a pizza pan (also weird i know) they were about an inch deep hell a frisbee would work, anyways, id sometimes water in the saucer, and id let it soak it up from the bottom was a slow process, kinda cool the first time watching it wick up all the water, eventually it would stop wicking the water, then id lift her back onto her home saucer ( which has little 1 inch pieces of pvc scattered in the bottom to keep the bottom from ever resting on anything other than a few inches of rounded pvc) this allowed any additional runoff to drip down into another saucer ensuring I didn't let her sit in any old water.


edit found one of my old videos showing what i mean