Transplanting In Coco? How Do You Do It?

[Hb413]

My plants tend to lose vigor as I transplant them out of their solo cups and into 1 gallon pots and then from 1 gallon pots to 3 gallon pots.

Everything goes pretty smoothly while they are in solo cups but when they hit bigger containers, I am having trouble keeping them happy. After I transplant to a new pot, I have been doing one good watering, to runoff, and then letting the pots dry out (not completely) over the next several days so the roots can search around and fill up the pot.

Is it good to water to runoff initially after a transplant? My plants are showing the overwatering look very mildly in the pics below. I have also tried only watering to the size of the rootball without getting any runoff but I feel like this will cause salt buildup if I'm not flushing out any of the old salts every time I water, or should I just be using a lower EC when doing this? How do you do it and maintain the praying leaves ?

Using a 60/40 canna coco to perlite mixture
Rhyzotonic foliar at transplant

 

[Savage Henry]

Coco alone has about 30% air in it when it's fully soaked, add some perlite and you may be closer to 35-40%. Canna reccomended irrigating when half of the water is gone from the pot. But you want to initiate a bit of dryness stress so the roots stretch out into the new pot, so maybe irrigate when only 40% of the water is left. Do this by weighing the plant @ field capacity. Keep track of how much nute solution you water it with, subtract the runoff and boom, that's how much water it holds. 1ml=1g. You can then determine how much they've drank by weight.

As for transplanting I've seen stress lessened by dipping the roots in a beneficial bacteria solution and then transplanting it into the larger pot.

 

[Funkadelic]

Coco alone has about 30% air in it when it's fully soaked, add some perlite and you may be closer to 35-40%. Canna reccomended irrigating when half of the water is gone from the pot. But you want to initiate a bit of dryness stress so the roots stretch out into the new pot, so maybe irrigate when only 40% of the water is left. Do this by weighing the plant @ field capacity. Keep track of how much nute solution you water it with, subtract the runoff and boom, that's how much water it holds. 1ml=1g. You can then determine how much they've drank by weight.

As for transplanting I've seen stress lessened by dipping the roots in a beneficial bacteria solution and then transplanting it into the larger pot.

Look healthy to me!
Generally, thick overgrowing root masses, slightly dry and thirsty before xplant, always ALWAYS use Mykos (but agree with @Savage Henry RE: bacteria too, many choices, but Mykos in hole and roots touch it immediately)....

I use Nectar for the Gods 1-Shot also on top, its more myco plus PK.

I use tea to transplant not food myself. Hope this helps.

 

[Hb413]

Savage Henry and Funkadelic, thanks for the replies, I have weighed my pots and am keeping an eye on them day by day, as far as Mykos goes, I am not using RO water, i use tap water at 200ppm (bubbled for a day at least to get rid of most chloramine), do you know if this will kill the beneficials from mykos? I'm looking at the wettable powder since I have already transplanted..

 

[Hb413]

Maybe when I water at transplant, I can use RO to not kill whats living in the mykos, just a thought