"Kay" wrote in message
...
In article , Franz Heymann
notfranz.
writes

"Martin Brown" wrote in message
...

I grow cacti and water them like normal house plants in
mid-summer
but
they are planted in a very free draining grit with a small amount
of
compost so they dry out between waterings.

That is good practice for growing cacti.. So how does that affect
my
argument about the relative sizes of the plant and its pot?

Sometimes I have a cactus that is not happy, and when I tip it out
of
its pot, I find that it has a poor root system. I find repotting
into a
much smaller pot is more effective in encouraging growth than
repotting
into the same pot. I put it down to lack of invertebrates etc in
compost
and pot. It could be disease in the original pot, but I think not a)
because the most likely is root mealy bug and I check for that b) if
disease were there, the plant would carry it into the new pot.


I suspect you are somewhat meagre with the watering.

The right adjectives would be "lazy" and "irregular", not "meagre".
{:-))


Where I live at the moment I am having to tip water out of trays
under
pots containing small trees.
I am supposed to be watering them for a
neighbour but we had 100mm of rain in the last two days!

What on earth are these trays doing under the pots?

You need to ask that? ;-) "lazy" and "irregular" watering means that
the
soil dries out, and it's extremely difficult to wet it again. So a
tray
under the pot catches the water as it comes through and allows the
soil
to soak it up at leisure

I have never had trays under our outdoor pots, only in the case of
small indoor pots on a window sill, and I have never had serious
watering problems. On the odd occasion when a pot has become bone
dry, I have put a plastic bottle with a *very* small puncture in its
bottom, filled with water, on the compost, so that it could leak water
into the pot over a period of an hour or so. That has always coped
with getting the compost damp again.

Franz