i have a friend that's growing the wild kind, indica, in a fairly small space - 2'x2'x4.' it's about a 90 bloom cycle, but at 60 days the roots choke out the air stone. without changing set-ups (2 gallon bucket with flat air stone at bottom) can the roots be pruned back without fear of damaging the plant? or would a more aggressive branch pruning have an effect on the roots? oddly enough, this all began when he started using spring water instead of tap water. thanks. "anything written by 1018am is purely for entertainment purposes and is total fiction"
in soil yes you can, probably not recommended but... just go buy a flat disc style air stone....you shouldn't prune roots in dwc
you may find some help on bonsai and root trims here: http://forum.grasscity.com/advanced-growing-techniques/291687-bonsai-mums-guide.html but i would say the ideal thing to do would be to switch it out to a bigger bucket or even a small tote. rubbermaid and sterilite both sell 5-10 gallon totes that stand less than a foot off of the ground, probably no taller than the bucket you are using now, just wider. roots are a good thing. more growth underneath=more growth on top. and roots are especially important when you are putting her through the stress of constant pruning and cutting to keep her small enough to fit in your grow area. another thing to try is to put a mesh pot or something similar over the air stone. of course the roots will grow through it eventually, but if you absolutely cannot go with a bigger rez because of space, using a mesh pot to hold the roots back (even if this saves the stone from being choked for just a couple extra weeks) may be the way to go.
yes you can root prune,try and cut out the thicker older roots and try to leave as much of the small fibrous ones and dont prune more than 30percent..hope this helps kgb
True, you can prune the roots. I'm wondering about your statement that your roots have choked your air stone. I just finished a grow with 6 plants in an 8 gallon tote with 6 gallons of water, way too many plants for that little tote, but I got some great bud. The root mass was amazing! but I never had any trouble with them and my air stone. I just started another grow, 3 northern lights and 2 sour diesel, I got them going in the tote and then moved the SD into a 5 gallon bucket. When taking the SD out the roots were amazingly tangled up so I had to cut quite a bit to separate them. It didn't phase them one bit. They were 16" tall when I took them out and 8 days later they were 24" tall, great growth rates! Not phased one bit by the root trimming.
My airstone ends up in the middle of my rootball. most of the oxygen ends up filtering through the roots before it got to the res. The girls seem to love it. My new res has an airstone per plant with the plan of making the rootballs swallow them. You can barely see the stone in the closest ball. Notice the size difference in the roots with the embedded air stone from the one in the back. I say leave the roots alone. My $0.02