Be careful seeking advice from others and employing it without doing your own evaluation.
The choice of pot and medium are closely linked, and are also connected to your light levels, temperature, humidity, and air movement, not to mention the plants themselves. Oh yeah, how much you like to "mess with" your plants also plays a role in developing the right combination.
You are trying to balance the availability of moisture to the plant with the provision of lots of free air flow to the root system. For example, if you have a dense, water-holding medium, a clay pot will allow for faster evaporation than will a plastic one. If you tend to use or make up a coarser mix, as I prefer, then clay pots will dry out too fast, forcing me to water more often, so I go with plastic.
For traditional mixes and moss, I really like Air-Cone pots. They provide a bit of a "middle ground" between clay and plastic, and in addition to having lots of slots and that internal cone for improved air flow, they are quite durable, and can last for years.
As to the feeding, that too, is to some degree a matter of preference, but I can tell from your query that there are some basics you might want to think about.
I think it's valuable to think of fertilizer applications like calories in your own diet, with nitrogen being the big source of "calories" to the plant - you want them to get enough, but not too much, and in my opinion and experience, frequent, "light meals" are better than starvation followed by gorging.
Next, think about the fertilizers themselves - just as two choices from the menu will have totally different calorie levels, different fertilizer formulations have different chemistries. Eating salad for lunch daily may help you stay healthy and trim, but if you ate chocolate cream pie that way....probably not.
I feed my plants at every watering (out of laziness, as much as anything else, as a concentrate metering pump is automatically adding it), so usep about 75 ppm N solutions. If you were going to do so less frequently, using plain water in between, I'd recommend some thing on the order of 125-150 ppm N - more "calories" per "meal", but fewer meals per time unit. Dividing 10 by the %N gives teaspoons per gallon for 125 ppm N, and dividing 12 by that is the amount for 150 ppm N.
Forget the "water first, then feed" procedure. That was devised when folks fed VERY heavily, on an infrequent basis. Watering first saturates the velamen on the roots, limiting the absorption of the overly-strong fertilizer solution, which would otherwise be damaging. if you feed at reasonable levels, not only is their no need to do that, but it essentially prevents the plants from getting any reasonable amount of nutrition.
Whether it is plain water or a fertilizer solution, it is best to saturate the bark-based medium. Hardly any of it stays in the pot in the first place, and the heavy flow also flushes the pot and re-oxygenates the medium by drawing air with it.
Last edited by Ray; 04-16-2012 at 09:06 AM..
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