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Bottom Feeding Help

Pepperfreak

Pepperfreak

I just have quick question concerning bottom feeding.

I am in the process of watering my plants and just decided to start bottom feeding, but do not know how much to give them. Do i just keep adding water until the top of the soil becomes moist? How do I know when enough is enough?

Thanks

Paul
 
poke your finger down in the soil...:lol:...seriously...make a little hole that you can see in away from the plant...you can feel the moisture...if you can't you need more water...you will get a "feel" for the look of the soil and weight of the plant...I use weight of the plant to determine how much water it needs....

or...

you can get a moisture meter at your local Walmart for a few bucks...
 
I only bottom fed my plants once in a while (well, the potted ones anyways). I just let them sit in a large thing of water until the whole thing was saturated. I only did that every three weeks about. Just to make the roots go deeper.
 
Its hard to overwater when you're bottom feeding if you have a good loose soil. Just don't let the plant sit in the water for a long period of time, it will soak up what it needs quickly. I jugde things by weight too, its easy once you get used to it.
 
Well...I finished watering and I think that ALL of my peppers are happy now. They really needed it. Here are some pictures of what I have so far. I hope you all enjoy, I know I really like seeing everyones pictures.

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they're so cute, i love this stage when they're all this size and lined up it looks like a really tiny forest... with cups... whatever, it's my crazy immagination run amok, but i kinda wanna put those mini dollar store plastic animal toys in there sometimes...
when i bottom water i put a several small amounts of water in and when they start taking a real long time to suck it up that's a good cue that they're getting close to enough. if you put too much you don't want to let them sit in it and it's a real pain with my set up to empty out the tray if there's water left...
 
They look happy.....and healthy
 
I also think they look like a minature forest. All of my plants are doing good but I had poor germination of my slim Cayenne. Only had 4 sprout out of 18 seeds. I don't know what happened, I got the seeds from Tomatogrowers. Are cayennes just harder to start or could this possibly be a bad batch of seeds?
 
Someone once told me that bottom feeding is better to keep pests at bay, I don't know how true this is though. I think it was to do with the top layer of soil not being so moist.
 
Another advantage of bottom watering/feeding is that you don't run the risk of splashing stuff that is in/on the soil up on the plants. Therefore, it reduces the disease transfer from soil to plant.
 
After having bottem feed yesterday, I found it to be a lot easier, no mess and also after playing with a couple plants, it also seemed to take the guess work out of "how much water to feed" I just let the plants drink until they slowed down.
 
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