i've always grown some tropical fruit trees, but recently i've become a "bit" more interested in them. the following post is for the tropical fruit forum...optimal pot riddle.
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"if you really want to give something a head start, put it in a deep, deep ass pot." - flyingfoxfruits
"after 10+ years of side-by-side tests of different pots, i'm sold on the fabric pots, at least for my conditions." - coplantnut, experiments with container-grown mangosteen in colorado
"neither, after trying both pots you mentioned and the fabric pots, I have finally switched to regular nursery pots coated with microkote." - simon_grow, which is better? air-pots versus rootmaker's rootbuilder II
when i 1st moved into my place i dug a bunch of holes to plant trees. if i was lucky i would find a marble. i'd tell my girlfriend at the time that i had a valuable surprise for her and she was nice enough to pretend to be happy to receive a random marble. she ended up filling half a jar with them.
when i 1st joined this forum a little over a year ago i have to admit that i didn't do much digging to find old but valuable threads. the other day though, when i decided to share some of my thoughts on pots, i figured it would be a good idea to 1st dig to try and find some buried treasure.
here are some of the more or less relevant things i unearthed...
side by side microkote experiment - graftingavocados
why do my jackfruit seedlings always fail? - daintree
garcinia seedlings (confessions of a repot head) - ethan
sourcing tree pots - zephian
jabuticaba: how to grow them? - huertasurbanas
greenhouse, rootmaker pots for tropicals and fruit "porn" - mark in texas
air pruning pots--opinions? - starling1
100% synthetic potting mix? - josh-los-angeles
mangosteen and lychee, growing in warm enclosure - socal2warm
did i overlook the most useful content about pots? if so, please share it. overlooking the best things in life is one of the worst things in life. like the time i went to puerto vallarta 25 years ago and overlooked luc's garcinia.
if we could use our donations (to the tff) to determine the creation and order of forum categories, how much would we donate for the topic of pots? in my previous thread i didn't include the topic of pots among the top three topics that i'd be willing to donate for. maybe that was a mistake.
prior to digging for pot threads, i had never heard of microkote before, which was curious since it seemed quite useful, but i don't remember it being mentioned in any relatively recent threads. so i googled within this site and found 1 microkote search result since 2018.
then i found 0 "semi-hydro" search results since forever.
which is more useful... semi-hydro or microkote or...?
naturally we all have different conditions, so something that is useful in wet conditions, for example, might be useless in dry conditions. optimal is relative, kinda.
a year ago i visited the salton sea for the 1st time and was intrigued that the shore consisted of a very loose mix of barnacle shells, fish bones and sand. i asked my friend whether it might make a good medium and she replied something like, no way, it's toxic! i replied, hold my beer. i found a random empty 5 gallon pot, filled it with the seashore medium, took it home and rinsed it several times. then i stuck two well callused aloe cuttings (tenuior and my tenuior hybrid) into the medium in a 1 gallon pot. for the sake of comparison i stuck two more cuttings in pure pumice and two more cuttings in cat liter (my ex left it)...
the cat liter was an obvious fail, guess it was the wrong kind. but surprisingly the salton sea medium seemed to work. here's a recent pic...
the roots...
the left two aloes were in the salton seashore medium, the two on the right were in pure pumice. the roots that were in pumice look a bit better so it seems reasonable to say that with these two aloes, and in my relatively drier conditions, pumice is a bit more optimal than the salton seashore. but perhaps in wetter conditions the seashore medium would be a bit more optimal.
