Good Morning
@Emilya, want to play Monday Morning Musings with me?
I was looking around my grow room and thinking I'm pretty lucky. I have space, warmth, technology, etc...whatever I need to grow a plant however I want pretty much. Specifically as tall as I want, as the 5x5 is 9 feet tall.
I started to think about the people who DON'T have unlimited vertical space, and wondering what I would do were I in that position. There's a lot of folks on here doing radical things to create space. I've seen a 5x5 laying on it's side and used horizontally even.
That got me wondering about pot plant roots and how they grow. It seems to me that much of the wasted space in a grow, especially if you are pressed for height, is from the height of the pot. That's a foot or more right there, and seemingly nothing that can be done about that particular thing. Sure, it's not a lot of space. But what if you only have two or three feet to grow the plant? Suddenly that foot of a pot matters a lot.
But maybe there is a way to mitigate the height of the pot for folks in such a position.
What would happen if you grew a plant, instead of in a 5 gallon pot, in a 5 gallon TRAY? Like a 5 gallon baking dish type thing. So it's maybe 4-6" tall, and as wide as it would be to make 5 gallons. Can one grow a pot plant in a tray like that? That would require the plant's roots to go horizontal after just a few days and force the roots to grow along the tray, rather than down. Same volume as a pot. Would the plant grow like that? Will pot plant roots spread to find what they need in that manner?
You see where I'm going here, right? Got any thoughts?