hello friends In today's episode we look at two air pruning techniques does the
air pruning technique really work? well let's find out the basic concept behind
air pruning is that when roots come into contact with air they die and then
the plant grows even more vigorously because it produces more roots
so our first air pruning technique uses a method called grow bags filled
now this is a very cheap grow bag that you can get
from Walmart you can get to $0.50 is really cheap and then just to hold the
plant in place I'm using this basket which will hold the bag and the soil in
place now if you look at the surface of the soil it looks really dry and this is
one of the problems I noticed with grow bags that you need to use some kind of
mulch to make sure the soil is moist all the time
otherwise the bag dries really quick so what happens is that when you grow
plants in grow bags the plant send out roots and when their roots reach the
outer area of the grow bag they come into contact with air and then they die and
the plant produces more roots which means it producers more leaves more
stalks more flowers and that's the whole idea of air pruning now one more thing
to note is that the growbag doesn't contain as much soil as let's say our
rope bucket container or whiskey bottle container so considering the amount of
soil that has the plant has grown really well and that's the whole idea of air
pruning
towards grow it uses all the potting soil that's available to the plant
inside the grow bag now let's look at the harvest the harvest looks pretty
good it doesn't look very different from a harvest from a regular container so the
grow bag experiment I think we can conclude that and this is just my
opinion is that it's really not a magic pill it will let you go very healthy
plants
earth-friendly because you're using grow bags and the concept of air pruning
actually works as we will soon find out I'm removing this plant from the
grow bag
and let's take a look at how the roots are now you can see here the roots did
grow the job the grow bag and then they kind of died and grew back to produce
more roots there so you can see some kind of fibrous root mass around the
edges but again you see the same thing in a container probably close that's why
it's definitely not a magic pill so great method to grow plants but not a
magic pill so our second method for pruning rules is by using basket that
have a lot of holes you can even use buckets and drill holes in them you can
use any kind of container and then make holes so there they have a lot of air
pockets around them and a landscape fabric you can use any kind of weed block
landscape fabric wherever you go alert make sure the container has a lot of
holes because drainages was one of the issue that I have experienced this kind
of container and since this makes us to drain well I'm using the 511 potting
mix as some of you might already know this is a very high porosity potting mix
that is made using peat moss, perlite and wood chips and once you make the
potting mix just make sure that you have enough potting mix for the whole basket
it does take up a lot of space and it does need a lot of soil now the bigger
container you use the more soil you will need so what you do is just lay our
landscape fabric around the basket and the concept is to make sure that this
soil doesn't fall down from those big holes inside the basket but at the same
time you want your plants to send out roots towards those big open areas so
that these would get pruned and you get the effect of air pruning
now it will be a challenge to hold landscape fabric around the
potting mix so make sure you use the weight of the potting mix itself so
that the landscape fabric stays in place and once you fill it out just use
a little knife to cut along the edges to make sure you have just enough cloth
left over to hold the soil and then you can add some additional mulch if you
want I'm just going to use the same wood chips that are used in the potting mix
so that acts pretty much the same and is a good mulch as well because
the moisture in the soil and now I'm gonna plant this eggplant
is about one and a half years or over and I over wintered it from the previous year and I
cleaned up the roots, prune them a little bit and then make sure it stayed in
water for about 15 to 20 minutes and we planted in our pruning container that we
just made as soon as you plan to make sure the potting mixes adequately moist
and that's not see how this plant grows forward from here so you can see here
the water does come out of all the sides of the container which is a good sign it
has good drainage and two months later you can see that the plant has shot up
really well this plant is growing very healthy in this air pruning container so
what's happening inside is that
the plant is sending out roots towards the basket towards the large holes in
the basket and then what happens is that when it gets in contact with the air
these roots died and then the plant produces more roots so that's the whole
science behind air pruning the the same grow bags and which
case your bags would act as the barrier between
the soil and the air and in this case is these large pockets and this
basket which will act as a barrier no ones that would come in contact with the
air their roots grow again that's just how nature works and as you can see
this plant has grown really well for a container of this size I would say that
the plant had really good growth and if you look at the flowers look at the
eggplants are the producers the quality is pretty good now would have been
different if I was going to use a container really close but
it's not like these plants are growing extraordinary well or something
that's really different about these plants yes they did produce a lot of the
flowers and by air pruning you can have plants that are very healthy
already in the beginning of the growing season and they will produce very well
as you can see this eggplant a delicious eggplant variety by the way you must check
out growing the plant variety in my video and at the end of the season nine
months later let's remove this plant and as you can see here this container
was a very very draining container the soil was pretty well draining and this
is one of the advantages of using the 511 mix it has very good porosity very
good drainage but the the hardware cloth that I put at the bottom was a little
bit soggy not something that I expected
the cloth to have better drainage but if you look at the roots again
let's look at the roots closely you can see that they did get pruned you can see
those fibrous roots around and that's what caused the plant to grow really well
so what's the conclusion well this is my opinion by using grow bags or by
using these baskets landscape fabric cloth and introducing this root pruning
technique the plants grow well and there are some other benefits of using these
methods that is by avoiding plastic if you use cloth your avoid plastic you
can even root pruning when you remove the plants but it's no magic pill it's
not that this method will let you grow super big plans without taking any
efforts you need to stick to the basics good soil fertilizer regular watering
they can get a few plants that's what's going to give you the best plans let me
know what you think of air pruning do you think this technique works have you
tried it to use grow bags or this basket method of air pruning a plant
do let me know
leave a comment and I'll see you again soon happy gardening