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.
here are some random sidewalk succulents...
no drainage. suboptimal right? well, at least during winter when it rains here.
here are some tillandsia aeranthos that volunteered on chairs at loran whitelock's place in eagle rock...
those chairs as they are would certainly be suboptimal pots for most other plants. epiphytes are fun.
20 years ago at the ucla botanical garden i saw a rhipsalis growing from a staghorn growing on a tree...
this might have been the 1st time that i encountered a platycerium functioning as a "pot". perhaps i assumed that stags only made good pots for epiphytes, but over the years i realized that even some terrestrial plants would happily grow in stags.
my friend jerry in eagle rock had a staghorn hanging directly above a rose bush. a tall rose stem managed to get enveloped by the stag which functioned as a perfect air-layer that the rose stem rooted into. when jerry moved the stag he cut the rose stem below the stag and now he has a rose growing solely in a stag...
i visited andy's orchids a few years ago and noticed that he had a lemon or strawberry guava growing in a platycerium andinum that was growing on a palm...
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at the top you can see fruit developing! in theory all trees can be trained like cascade style bonsai, which in this case would make the guavas easier to pick.
stags can essentially transform any tree into a fruit tree. of course it's a bit difficult to imagine jackfruits dangling from a tree that is growing on a staghorn that is growing on another tree. i really don't know how much weight a stag on a tree can handle.
the "medium" that stags produce is perhaps most similar to peat, but it isn't nearly as dense. it holds moisture but also drains really well.
"moist but well-drained" seems kinda like a paradox but it's optimal for many, if not most, plants in many, if not most, conditions.
around a decade ago i bought a dendrobium aphyllum from a sale at the huntington. it grew quite well outside and each year it put on a nice show...
why, exactly, did it do so well? i'm guessing that it was a combination of 2 things...
- pumice
- semi-hydro
the result of this combo was "moist but well-drained" just like with the stag, but not equally so of course.
i can't take credit for either the pumice or semi-hydro since the orchid was in the same medium/pot that the huntington put it in. but i can take credit for occasionally adding osmocote and mostly remembering to water.
here's a pic of the same type of pot (with the same type of medium) but with a different plant (rhipsalis) also from the huntington...
as you can see the drainage holes are slightly higher than the bottom of the pot.
i ended up adopting pumice a lot sooner than semi-hydro. i vaguely remember finding the same type of pots online (this?) but didn't buy them for some reason or another. maybe the price was too high? i don't remember ever looking for other types of semi-hydro pots.
at some point i started making my own pots for all the seeds i was sowing. i used smaller plastic water bottles. for each batch of seeds i would hedge my bets in terms of drainage holes and medium...
heh, this batch from 2016 was a rather extreme hedge in terms of medium. i think that i was trying to find the optimal medium for seeds of reed-stem epidendrum orchids. it's one of the few orchids with seeds that have enough nutrients to germinate on their own.
i'm guessing that on every third pot i cut the drainage holes higher up.
for a few more years i continued splitting seeds between semi-hydro pots and regular pots, but then one time the only bromeliad seedling to survive from a batch of seeds was in a semi-hydro pot...
since then all the pots i've made have been semi-hydro.
admittedly, correlation does not mean causation. perhaps this seedling was simply better adapted to my conditions than its siblings. or perhaps it was located in a marginally better microhabitat than its siblings.
i start nearly all my seeds indoors in sealed zip lock bags, so adequate moisture is less of an issue, at least initially. but it's definitely an issue once i remove the seedlings from the bags and put them outdoors. generally i can be fairly consistent about watering, especially during summer. but the rest of the year i might skip a watering or two for something like this blog entry for example. however there are so many other factors involved, such as light, temps and fertilizer, that it's hard to definitively determine the usefulness of semi-hydro.
it's certainly an interesting situation though. all the pots i make are semi-hydro but, except for the hanging huntington plants, virtually all the plants i buy come in regular pots...
the variety of drainage holes is fascinating.
if we think in terms of natural selection, and assume that semi-hydro is optimal, then why haven't drainage holes marginally moved accordingly? confounding factors muddying the waters?
As well might it be said, that of two trees, sprung from the same stock one cannot be taller than another but from greater vigor in the original seedling. Is nothing to be attributed to soil, nothing to climate, nothing to difference of exposure - has no storm swept over the one and not the other, no lightning scathed it, no beast browsed on it, no insects preyed on it, no passing stranger stripped off its leaves or its bark? If the trees grew near together, may not the one which, by whatever accident, grew up first, have retarded the other's development by its shade? - J.S. Mill
"all else being equal" aka ceteris paribus is often theoretically claimed in economics, but outside of laboratory conditions it is virtually impossible to attain. but this doesn't mean that it's impossible to learn from informal experiments.
not sure exactly when but, thanks to a good friend, i also started sometimes using bigger water bottles...
a durian seed from a store bought fruit wasn't too irradiated to germinate. it's in a 50 oz water bottle, 3 of which fit perfectly in a 2 gallon zip lock bag. in this case though i'm going to quickly need a bigger bag.
here's another very pleasant surprise...
it's a jackfruit seed starting to germinate alongside the very rare eugenia tinctoria. i always hedge my bets when i sow seeds.
here's a better pic of the bottle...
this is a recent pic of a palmer mango seedling on the left and a champagne mango seedling on the right.
sadly this was not a side-by-side experiment. i just put them side-by-side for the sake of pot comparison.
right after taking this pic i noticed the dust on the palmer seedling which i tried to remove with the spray from a hose nozzle. unfortunately the setting was wrong. the palmer seedling fell over and the top portion broke off. tall pots are top heavy.
i grafted the top of the palmer onto a noid root stock and decided to "approach graft" the bottom portion onto the champagne, which i potted up 1st...
i got the idea of multi-rootstock grafting from simon_grow's thread on the topic... california super mango rootstock experiment. in this case the palmer seedling is well-established with a decent root system, but it's stressed out from losing half of its photosynthetic power. the champagne mango, on the other hand, still has all its leaves but it's stressed out from being repotted, and it has a much smaller root system. in theory they can help meet each other's needs. they can fill each other's holes...
It is these needs which are essentially deficits in the organism, empty holes, so to speak, which must be filled up for health’s sake, and furthermore must be filled from without by human beings other than the subject... - Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being
individually the two mango seedlings would compete, but when combined they should cooperate, hopefully.
in the tall, black, square pot next to the conjoined mango is a garcinia madruno seedling that i bought from bestday. it's still in his medium and pot, which he purchased from stuewe and sons.
here's a comparison of the drainage holes...
the medium doesn't fall out of the stuewe pot because of... magic. the medium doesn't fall out of my pot because... it can't. actually that drainage hole is a bit more narrow than normal. no two holes i cut are exactly alike but here are some that are a bit more typical for the larger water bottles...
there's a pretty big difference between the holes on my pots and the holes on stuewe's pot in terms of size, shape, quantity and location.
i considered buying stuewe's pots for my 10 yangmei (myrica rubra) trees from the most recent group order, but i decided to use my larger water bottle pots for the 7 smallest trees and 1 gallon pots for the other 3. i cut extra semi-hydro holes in 4 of the water bottle pots which went into the smaller greenhouse...
i gave them extra fast draining medium since all the other plants in this greenhouse are mounted and watered more frequently.
the rest of the yangmeis went into the larger greenhouse which is warmer, brighter and less humid. their medium is a bit slower draining. it will be interesting to see which group does better.
here's a recent pic of some jackfruit seedlings in larger water bottle pots...
for comparison, here's a pic of an earlier batch of jackfruit seedlings a year ago...
most of the jackfruit seedlings in this earlier batch made it to summer, but none of them survived my two week absence during november. it was too much dryness rather than too much cold that killed them. of course i should have potted them up in the summer.
i don't think it's just the rainforest seedlings that appreciate having a built in reservoir of water...
this aloe seedling was asking politely with its roots to be potted up, but the wait list is always very long. here are two aloe seedlings that i had just potted up...
pretty sure that the left seedling is an aloe bakeri hybrid while the other might be an aloe africana hybrid.
it's hard to say what difference it makes that the plastic is clear. of course it's nice being able to see root development, but i'm sure that it can get too hot in direct summer sun. in shade, algae can grow which might not be the best thing.
one time when i visited my friend jerry i was very surprised to see one of my fav epiphytic ferns, lemmaphyllum microphyllum, actually growing on the inside of one of the small water bottles i had given him...
ehhhh? could this neat trick be used to create something awesome?
here was another surprise, albeit less neat...
i remember recycling some medium and filtering out the small stuff, but evidently the seed of this lucky canna was too big.
a friend of mine in inglewood has staghorns volunteer in drainage holes...
even a platyerium superbum...
what would be the optimal pot to maximize staghorn recruitment? i'm guessing semi-hydro, but no idea how many holes. naturally the more holes the pot has the faster the medium would dry out.
back to the topic of stags as pots...
those beautiful pink root tips are from a ficus thonningi that i combined with a platycerium willinckii...
can't see the ficus that well, unlike the kalanchoe uniflora, which should definitely be added to every mossy mount.
should aesthetics factor much into pot optimization? it's impossible for a traditional pot to match the beauty of a stag, but i certainly did appreciate these pots made by barry fisher...
perhaps this next piece was going to be made into a pot...
his wife yvette was a really talented grower...
does this begonia hydrocotylifolia on a rock count as semi-hydro? what kinda rock is that?
there's certainly more than one way to "pot" a plant.
earlier i noted that all the pots i make are semi-hydro but virtually all the plants i buy come in regular pots. i should also note that for larger plants i always use regular pots...
on the left is a myrica californica that i approach grafted a starter myrica cerifera onto. on the right is the same thing, but they are in the same pot, unlike the other two, which are in different pots.
none of the pots are semi-hydro. so why didn't i make or buy semi-hydro pots for these myricas? it's certainly the case that, all else being equal, a larger plant is more tolerant of drought than a smaller one. then again, the goal isn't to survive... it's to thrive. would there be more thriving if semi-hydro pots were the rule rather than the exception? all else being equal, maybe not because i get the feeling that more plants would rot, given that most mediums are relatively dense. but if mediums changed accordingly then it might be a different story.
it's certainly true that there's always room for improvement. the challenge is that it's not easy to pinpoint the source of improvement. if the two myricas in different pots do better than the two myricas in the same pot, it would be hard to say it was because they were in different pots. there are so many confounding factors.
a while back i made a pic to illustrate the idea of imperfect feedback...
according to einstein's mirror his hair wasn't disheveled at all. everyone could see that his hair was crazy but nobody said anything.
prior to the myricas being conjoined, cerifera could see that californica's hair was crazy but it didn't say anything. but when they were conjoined, californica could see itself through cerifera's eyes.
now if cerifera happens to find a buried treasure, such as a slow release granule, it can't hide its discovery from californica, even if their roots are in separate pots.
cerifera: eureka!
californica: i see what you found!
cerifera: problem is that i can't use it since i'm from florida but now i'm in california in the middle of winter. it's way too cold for me to grow now.
california: don't worry, i'll put that fertilizer to good use since this is the perfect growing temperature for me. but i'm going to direct plenty of my energy to the growth of your roots so you will hopefully find more buried treasure.
cerifera: oooo, and then i'll have plenty of roots by the time the weather warms up.
is this really how it works? can cerifera really grow roots when it's too cold for it to grow shoots?
i have a third cerifera/californica combo that also includes a small piece of rubra that i cleft grafted onto the californica. what does their conversation sound like?
my body consists of around 100 trillion cells. what does our conversation sound like? i contain multitudes, but i'm coherent, kinda.
the tropical fruit forum (tff) does not contain multitudes, maybe it contains 100s? each member lives somewhere different, has different conditions, tries growing different fruits, uses different techniques... we are all so different. we are coherent to the extent that we communicate with each other. better communication would make us more coherent.
one of the most important thing we can communicate is when we find treasure. like when you see a sign for a plant yard sale and discover this...
a randomly variegated stem of hollyleaf cherry (prunus ilicifolia)! woah! then you have a dilemma... moral or economic? do you try to honestly communicate its value or do you try to pretend that it's kinda pretty and offer $10 bucks for it?
the correct answer is that you should honestly communicate the value of the variegated cherry. so when, exactly, should we not honestly communicate value?
in traditional economics "deals" (aka consumer surplus) are a good thing. but every time you get a deal you're dishonestly communicating value. the better the deal the greater your deception. traditional economics isn't coherent.
if the tff used donations to communicate the value of topics, then admittedly we wouldn't be perfectly honest with each other, but we'd be a lot more honest than we are now. the result would be a much more coherent community.
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update: 9 feb
decided to try inarching a soursop seedling and a cherimoya seedling. naturally these seedlings were mixed in with other seedlings...
the white pot, which was in a greenhouse, included spanish lime, soursop and panache fig. the semi-hydro pot, which was outside, included mandelo, cherimoya and surinam cherry. i removed the seedlings from the pots and inspected the roots that had been in the resevoir of the semi-hydro pot...
here were the seedlings laid out...
from left to right, spanish lime, soursop, panache fig, mandelo, cherimoya and surinam cherry.
i inarched the soursop and cherimoya...
it was a rather delicate procedure, hopefully the two patients will successfully combine.
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update: 31 mar
removed tape from soursop + cherimoya, garcinia pacuri + intermedia...
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