The Grow Room

The Growroom Returns – The Tobacco Plant Meets Autopot [Part 1]

Good afternoon everyone and welcome back to The Growroom!

Our next project in the growroom was to repopulate our Autopot system. Our Autopot system displays the three types of pots that are available to purchase with the system and gives our customers an opportunity to come in and experience a working grow system in action, whilst demonstrating the options available.

Step 1 – We recently showed you how to take cuttings from a Tobacco plant, in which, if you remember, we used a clean scalpel blade, Clonex Rooting Hormone, Jiffy Pellets, and a Garland Propagator. For more in-depth details please see our blog on How to Take Cuttings.

Step 2 – By maintaining humidity and providing the cuttings with light you should see roots starting to appear within 7-10 days.

Step 3 – Time to pot on! – Once the roots have started to show through the Jiffy peat pellet we can look to further encourage vigorous root growth by transferring the Jiffy peat pellet in to a 0.7L pot. If we left the cuttings in the peat pellets for too long the roots would go brown and die as exposed to too much air or light.

Why a 0.7L pot and not straight in to the Autopot? In the gardening world it has always been said that you always move up pot size in small increments, that roots like “to be hugged just a little”, that it stops the plant focussing too much energy on root growth at the detriment of plant growth. However the science actually shows plants do well in large pots – if grown in the ground their pots are limitless, so why should pot size matter? Probably best to say that by moving up in small increments it reduces the ability to over water the pots – a smaller amount of soil will dry out quicker allowing more oxygen to reach the roots, and reduces costs on fertilizer and growing media.

We used a growing medium suitable for young plants or seeds – Light Mix, either Bio Bizz or Plagron are ideal as they both carry a minimal amount of nutrient in the soil. We started by filling our pot with Bio Bizz Light Mix, made a hole in the middle of the pot and sprinkled some Plant Magic Granules in to the hole. This granular inoculant of Mycorrhiza, bio-stimulants and over 20 strains of micro organisms is added to help promote rapid root growth whilst also protecting the roots from fungal pathogens. The rooting Jiffy peat pellet is then placed in the hole, and any extra soil needed is added.

The pots are then placed under our propagation lighting we used to root the cuttings, we used the Nanotech Sunblaster T5, watered regularly using a mix of Plant Magic Root Stimulator, to stimulate biological activity around the root zone, and a mild feed (1/4 strength) of Formulex.

Check back next week for the next stage as we pot on our tobacco cuttings into the Autopot System.

Products we used…