My big bushy plant has out grown my Aerogarden system and I don't have the budget to make a bigger system. Is there ANYTHING I should know or do when I transplant my baby to a regular soil pot? I tried to find a similar post and couldn't. Thanks for any help in advance!
First, relax. She's gonna be fine. Second, you're going to need to trim her back a bit. The transition from sucking water through roots in water to sucking water through roots in dirt is a major one so she'll need a bit less foilage, about half. You're going to chop about half her roots off so the foilage left should match. Trim her today and look forward to transplanting in about 5 days to a week. After the week when she's recovered, trim the roots to about half their original size. Give her about 4 days to recover from that. This step is optional but actually helps a lot if you have container large enough to do it with. Soak the whole plant for about half an hour to an hour. I'm serious here. It won't hurt your plant and will help it a lot to be completely saturated with water while it's changing over to dirt roots. Make sure your soil is very fluffy and light. Pre-moisten it until you can sqeeze a handful of it and BARELY have a drop of water form but not squeeze out and drip off your hand. Use this soil to fill your pot, minus the hole where the root ball will be going. Pull the plant out of the hydro setup (or container you were soaking in) and sprinkle DRY dirt on the roots. Optimally you'll want to cover every root with a bit of soil so you'll have nice dry, soil covered roots in your root ball. Don't worry if you break roots, just be sure not to leave a bunch of broken roots in the dirt. Be careful but not brain surgery careful. Hold the plant over the pot with the roots in their final height and slowly fill in with moist soil until you've filled the pot. Water thoroughly with a Vitamin B1 rooting hormone solution or fish emulsion and let it dry over the next several days. Your baby should be fully rooted by the next time you need to water her.
My pleasure. I've seen the subject come up many times. I believe I've also posted the reverse on here; How to go from soil to hydro. Those two get asked a lot and most people don't know the first thing about it.
hey did this method work for you alright? find any new or tweaked version of this method? im about to attempt the same thing with my aerogarden.
well i just did the same thing before i read this i transplanted my plant from my bubbleponic system to a 5gallon bucket my system is in my all glass hottub room so im using actual sunlight my plants get more than enough light i didnt trim the foliage or the roots i really hope i didnt just murder one of my babies i did it because the leaves were getting these white spots little round white circles i know its not mites i inspect them a few times a day and my ph is set to 6.0-6.5 iunno if maybe thats to high or to low this is my 1st "legal" med grow any thoughts or tips would be great
DONT DO IT. I just did this on a bunch of plants, and now less than 24hrs later they look almost dead. Completely shrivelled up. I'm staring at $1000 dollars worth of fucking junk now. Tried to foliar feed them, I'm sure there was the right amount of water in the soil but now they're gone. They had massive roots from a DWC bubbler which I trimmed back to get them in soil. I guess they're having a hard time sucking the water out of the soil. I was planning to go from my aero prop straight into soil but this one spent many of it's veg days in a dwc bubbler. Big mistake to move from that to soil. Do it when the plant is young with small roots and you should be ok, do it when the plant is an adult - bad.
Transplant it when the roots are 1/2 inch to 1 inch long and you shouldn't have any problems doing this when you clone. With lots of roots you need to trim them a little to transplant into soil.