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Growing in pots

millworkman said:
Exact quote "For every plant species we looked at, pot size was the factor limiting its growth." So where is the issue?

That means that they gave the plants every single bit of nutrition they needed and only changed the pot size. It doesn't matter if they were grown in concrete. The media stayed the same, the nutrition stayed the same only the pot size changed.
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But that's not possible. Either both plants received the same amount of water and nutrients so the larger pot was (closer to) an optimal environment and the smaller pot was overwatered and overfertilized (soil-fertilizer density too high so roots burnt), or there was less water and nutrients added to the smaller pot so the soil water and fertilizer percentages were the same as in the larger pot. Either way it can affect the plant growth so there is no way to rule it out as a variable IF they put no more consideration into it than trying to do it equal.

Plus, once the plant in the larger pot was getting bigger, if it was given the right amount of water and fertilizer, that's more water and fertilizer than the smaller plant can use.
 
AlabamaJack said:
when you can get 6 or 7 foot plants out of a 5 gallon container for a first year plant, why is this sad news?
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Well, yeah you can still do great in a container. I do pretty well myself, but to just think they can never reach their full potential. What if that 6 or 7ft plant could have been a mammoth redwood tree-like giant pepper plant producing pods the size of school buses.
 
Coud you eat a pod the size of a school bus?

Better to TRY to grow the 7 footer, even that is not easy for everybody.
 
Their results are not proof you can't get full potential from a containered plant, only that in their controlled experiment, they didn't get plants that grew as fast for a 44 day time period. If you alter some other variable instead of pot size, you may achieve a different result than they did.

Personally, when I have tried to grow plants in terribly undersized pots the plants became leggier than they otherwise would have. That changes their sun catching ability, subjects them to more wind stress, requires more energy to pump nutrients to the top. We don't know how undersized their pots were but judging by the MRI picture of barley and sugarbeet, that was a pretty small container they used.
 
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