JennyC wrote:
"K" wrote in message
...
JennyC writes

"Gareth" wrote in message
...
Why do I need to plant seedlings to sequentially bigger pots? Why
isn't possible to plant a seedling to just 1 pot - the final size
required by the adult plant?

Gareth.

I've wondered this myself Gareth. In the wild seeds just drop to
the ground and grow OK without being in pots at all!

In the wild, there tends to be other plants around taking up water.
In a pot, the soil seems to go a bit stale if you've got just one
tiny seedling sitting in the middle taking up water very slowly.
Totally non-scientific! Possibly utter rubbish. But it's how it
feels.

Fuzzy logic Kay - sounds right to me :~))

It's a matter of degree. If it's fast-growing, you can put into a lot
larger pot than you would, say. a cactus, which may require a whole
year to go up half a pot size.
Kay

I tend to plant stuff like parsley and basil in large pots where they
stay and that seems to work for me.

This just isn't fuzzy logic at all, but simple science. A pot isn't like
the open ground, where there's a continuous movement of moisture and
lots of roots and organisms shlurping away. Every fall of rain entrains
oxygen from the atmosphere, and the water keeps moving.

To reduce it to absurdity, imagine a little plant trying to grow in a
big jar of water. The oxygen supply would be exhausted very quickly, and
nasty anaerobic organisms would be the only things, if any, which would
have a chance of surviving, so the roots would die and rot. A plant is
an aerobic, not an anaerobic, organism. Too big a pot is quite similar
to that situation: the plant's root system isn't big enough to process
all that water, so the water goes stagnant (i.e., anaerobic).

Hydroponic systems keep the water moving and oxygenated: you can't do
that in a pot. So we only move pot-plants up one size at a time so that
they can exploit the growing medium to the full.

Dear old Franz, for ever missed from this group, had impeccable
scientific credentials, and said this was nonsense. But he was a
physicist, not a biologist, and spoke only from his personal
experience -- you don't get science from one individual's anecdotal
knack. And, crucially, he seems to have watered his pot plants very
sparingly, so they never sat in stagnant water, and so didn't suffer
from rot at the roots. You can do the same, and if you have the knack
it'll work out OK; but I still think results will be better if you play
by the rules.

--
Mike.