Cool thread. Spent the last hour reading the whole thing. I love ghetto grows and have tried a lot of crazy shit myself.

I came across this thread while searching the forums for info on transplanting and read your thread with a lot of interest and amusement.

I'm doing a bit of research into what is the minimum volume of soil one can use to have optimal yield. I saw your photos of your poor plants crammed into their new containers and had to finish reading the thread to see how they made out.

I don't have a car and getting soil really sucks. I feel like a major heatbag picking up and dropping off all these freakin bags of soil in a cab when there's 5 feet of snow on the ground. o.O

My home-made hydro system WAS going fine, but something fluked up and I got mad root rot now with anything I try to put in it. So, I transplanted what I could into 2L pop bottles. I cut the tops off the bottles and poked holes in the bottoms. (gotta recycle y'know)

The 2L pop bottles seem to work really well for the veg stage. I kept one of my plants as a mother in a 2L pop bottle for over 3 months before its roots looked really crammed up. I've put tin foil around some of them, and left others clear to watch the roots grow. Didnt notice any difference. The roots grew fine with the clear plastic.

The 2L pop bottles are a nice shape to grow in. Tall and skinny...you can easily pack 20 or 30 under a single HID light.

Some say you should have 1 cubic foot of soil per plant. I think that's way too much... 1 cubic foot is 28 liters! (7.5 US gal)

Big pots and soil for flowering are expensive too.

I think I've found the cheapest and easiest way to do the transplant for flowering: 2 weeks before flowering...buy 5 gal bags of soil....cut them in half....cut slits in the bottom of each half....and you have instant 2 planters with just enough dirt in each. You will need to put down plastic or something to deal with the run-off water when you water them.

But yea, hope to see how things went with the grow now that forums are back up. Cheers!