Quote Originally Posted by BobBong
That sounds much more reliable and less likely to give you moss growing on the top of the soil medium.

I've always understood that having a consistantly wet medium is a BAD thing, for seedlings, vegging plants and flower.. If anything as the plant grows you spread the watering out even more.. going from 4 or 5 waterings a week down to two or even one watering a week with a larger plant.

The larger the plant, the more water it's going to be absorbing.

Watering so that water comes out of the bottom of the pot would also ensure that the roots are growing down and using as much of the soil medium as possible.

A consistantly wet soil medium with seedlings can cause what's known as "damping-off".

Bob.
Hi Bob, can you clarify this for me... Watering the plant until it comes out the bottom takes Microorganisms and nutrients out of the medium. So in your opinion, what benefit does this serve?


Wet and dry cycles are very over rated in my opinion, because there is a certain amount of oxygen in the water your applying, albeit making up 1% of plants needs. Take for example Tranobles grow, he water's a certain amount that varies according to the plants life cycle. He dosen't flood and drain the soil from what I remember. He gets fantastic results, granted the room is sealed. Just like to hear some technical/scientific arguments why wet and dry cycles are better than precise amounts. Although water logging is a bad thing, I don't see the importance of trying to mimic outdoor conditions, seeing as all other conditions are subject to the growers intervention. I think that if you take some Hydrophonics systems as an example, the root ball can sustain themselves in water almost completely submerged without being suffocated. I think its a fallacy to assume that you can drown roots in a soil medium because the soil just is not saturated enough to devoid the medium of oxygen. You would have to water log the entire medium consistently to kill the roots.