what if u dont tranplant??????

1. root room

2. they will fight for light

3. survival of the fittest?

, but I am guessing you can still grow that way. You will more than likely sacrifice on the yield or quality of bud.

-C

 

If you're already growing them all in one pot, it's too late to transplant them separately. You'd need to manually disentangle all of the individual roots, which is an impossible job to do with soil blocking your view. If you gouge into the soil to try, you run a really high chance of severing roots and either killing your plants or stressing them to hermies.

If you leave them as is, you have a high risk of the roots strangling each other and ending up with no plants. Some people have had luck growing multiple plants in one pot, but it seems to be based almost entirely on luck.

If you want to keep this grow, I'd suggest pinching off the weakest looking plants so that their roots won't strangle the roots of your best plant.

 

people grow in beds with no problem, they should do fine. you could still separate them. just get a blade and cut-em-up. mother plants survive root trimming all the time.

 

I'll defer to growbot, plus I forgot that you could try cutting clones if all else failed.

 

the plants might be alive still, but they're going to have way less bud then they would if they were in their own pots. The more root room a plant has, the bigger the buds are going to be.

 

Not quite true... the longer you vegetate a plant for, and the more lumens (with balanced co2) you give it the bigger the buds will get. the room the plant has to grow in will also come into play... for example if you squeeze in 4 plants and in another room you just have one plant. The single plant will yield more that any of the four plants... may not yield as much as the 4 squeezed in plants in total, but will still yield close to that.

In fact root development has very little to do with eventual yield.

 

Then you should transplant into larger pots. It's possible to grow large plants indoors in tiny pots as you can provide them with constant feed and support.

If your plants are outside and in too small pots there's a very good chance that your plants will fall over once they reacc a certain size.

 

Actually, root development (and particularly the size of the root ball) has a lot to do with the size of the plant (longer veg period=more root development=bigger root ball), and a bigger plant will produce more bud, as you said. The biggest problem with using a small pot to grow is that the plant can become rootbound, which can cause all sorts of problems.

They don't though; as shivaganesha said, the plants will fall over when they reach a certain size if they don't have a root system large enough to support them.

 

What problems are caused from a 'rootbound' plant? What is rootbound?

Root development is instinctive and territorial. A root system will instinctively spread out, this is because of nutrients. In an outdoor environment nutrients can be scarce in one pocket of soil, or indeed well competed for already by other wildlife. So the roots will spread outwards to gain these food sources.

Once you place the plant into a pot, you are merely giving it the boundaries to which the root system can grow in. It is perfectly possible to grow a 3ft plant in a 0.5 liter pot... and yield up to 2oz from it when using a coco medium with perlite mix, although this of course depends on vegetation time. I put it to you that I could vegetate the plant in that pot for 2 months and carry it through to full harvest without ever changing its pot, and still yield a normal yield, 1.5-2oz per plant. With four squeezed beneath a single 400w hps.

 

Roots expand based on moisture in the soil rather than nutrients. But like I said in my previous post, it is possible to grow a big plant in a smaller pot but you run the risk of the roots trying to expand beyond the area that they have available. The effects can vary, but none of them are good. You don't have to take my word for it though, do a search for it and you'll see what other growers have to say about it.

And I'm not disputing that you could grow a large plant in a relatively small pot, but a bigger pot will allow you to grow a larger plant. If you can grow to 3' in a half-liter pot, then that size is sufficient to grow such a plant. You would not be able to grow a 3' plant in a party cup.

 

Yes the roots do swell up in response to moisture in the soil... sorry for being unclear, but what I actually meant was that the root system's actual growth or development is instinctive. I have analysed the root system to a certain degree, both in dwc and coco coir, and what I noticed was a distinct build up of roots around the outside of the coco, yet when i broke the coco in half the inside had nowhere near the root system it would appear from looking at the unbroken coco.

From witnessing this root development and studying it at varying stages of flower (from around the 3 week point, all early taken plants were crushed up and used for oil) I concluded that the roots will merely spread and mark out their territory within the confines of the pot. The root restrictions had no effects on plant growth nor nutrient uptake. Support for the plants is needed, and likewise fairly frequent feeds (although not as frequent as you might imagine).

How big is a party cup? Thankyou by the way, you've reminded me of an extension to this experiment I wanted to try out some time ago.

 

Party cups come in a few different sizes, but the kind I'm thinking of are about 12cm tall and have a diameter of about 9.5cm at the top. I'm intrigued by the experiment you're talking about though, and I'd love to hear some more about it.

 

Ah... i've tried both IE and Firefox and both times the attachments tab isn't working. I wanted to show you a pic of my 22" vegging plants inside a 12cm high x 10cm wide pot. They are approx 5 weeks old and about to be topped as they are showing sex (pre-flowering). I will carry them through to full harvest, even after being topped without changing the pot, no root trimming. Just a straight up grow.

 

this would be a nice experiment to actually see,
it would also save alot of space by keeping the plants in the same pots for the whole grow.

 

Definitely, if you can get the attachment working I'd love to see the plants. I've never had to deal with the issue myself, but I've seen so much information about plants being rootbound both here and in grow guides, I guess I never really thought to question it.

 

you can grow plants in whatever size container you want, without worrying about plants being rootbound. as stated earlier, rootmass is directly connected to plant size/yield. think of the folks who grow sog. those are basically rootbound, but still healthy. what you have growing below ground, only effects plant size, not health. as long as all of the plants nutritional needs are met, your shouldn't have any issues.

 

I beg to differ... most SOG plants are flowered after 5-7 days of veg... they are not basically root bound. I can veg a seed plant for 2 months and carry it through to a full normal harvest in a 5x5" pot.

rootmass is only connected to yield and size in as much as the roots need to spread to find enough food to sustain the growing plant above. In an indoor environment we can take away the roots need to spread by providing the plant with enough food.

It is said that the roots also need to spread to help support the above plant, well you can take away that need too by tying up your plants for support.

This is not an experiment, it has been done several times... also by more than one grower.

 

beg all you want. keeping root mass small is why plants stay smaller. didn't you see mr. miyagis bonsai plants on the karate kid? same same!