Yeah, baby. It's all in the lights, temps, nutes and grow medium. This kind of blows my whole theory that the bigger your pot, the bigger your root system, the bigger the plant, the bigger the buds! That root system must be one thick ball.
It doesn't blow it out of the water at all, all it shows is what can be achieved when you know what you're doing - and that's the key - all the equipment in the world won't grow you great plants - knowledge and understanding of their needs and requirements will though.
To grow great bud, you need to know how and be able to grow healthy plants, whatever you use to do it, is whatever your resources allow.
New growers like big pots, new growers are encouraged to use big pots, not *just* because big pots will give you the greatest potential yield, but because big pots buffer mistakes much more than little pots will. All that soil in that big pot is acting as a 'buffer' against mistakes like over-watering, under-watering and over- and underfertilising. The more soil substrate mass, the harder it will be to change the ph of that soil by watering with out of whack ph, the less watering will be needed (which reduces the potential for mistakes) and so on.
You can grow healthy plants in small pots, you can maximise yields with plants in small pots grown in SOG systems, but, and it's a big but, you have to know what you're doing. You have to understand that small pots = small root mass = low water and nutrient uptake and storage, which means more frequent water and nutrient feeds. The smaller the pot, the less nutrients it can hold and it almost gets to a stage where it's operating like a soiless mix, because there are no nutrients left in the soil - the soil substrate mass is so small it cannot hold many nutrients in it and they get depleted quickly, hence the need to understand how, when and how much nutrients to feed. The watering and nutrient feeding would be almost daily I'd say as opposed to every 4 or 5 days watering and every 8 to 10 days feeding in larger pots.
The capacity for mistakes is much higher in smaller pots than larger ones, because there's no margin for error, but by understanding the plants nutrient and water feeding frequency decent yields can be achieved without huge root masses, because the root mass is so much smaller - it cannot store as many nutrients and therefore they must be replaced more frequently.
