Watering Question

Ive read youre supposed to let the soil almost dry out before watering to get the roots some air. my plants are about 3 wks - 1mo old. 2 are in 5 gallon buckets 1 is in a huge bucket i had, its probably 25 gallons or more, not exactly sure. my question is this; when i let the soil dry out, do i water it so that its running out the bottom and completely drenched, or should i just put a measured amount of water in there while they are still young and taking a while for the water to be used up? any insight would be helpful thanks.

Put water until its dripping out the bottom..question answered

Yeah it can run-off, but what's more important is that the media is evenly and thoroughly wet. Some media when it dries out becomes hydrophobic and repels the water. In such a case the water flows over the surface then down the sides of the pot and straight out the holes without a drop reaching the center of the pot. If you haven't bone dried it out, that effect is not likely to be too pronounced for you, but when you water your goal is to make it all wet all the way though. As for it taking longer to dry out because the plant is small- that's a good thing because you can water less often (but soak when you do). Don't confuse that with having a bad draining soggy media though, i'm only talking about good media that is slow to dry because of plant size.

As a side note, if you ever end up with a hydrophobic pot plant, pop it inside a bucked and then water it down from the top. The water will go straight out the bottom and if it's really bad- the pot will actually float. Just hold it down and water it until the pot is mostly under water inside the buckets and then let it sit until it stops bubbling and it's wet all the way through.

PS: if you are using chemical salt fertilizers it's always best for something like 20% or 30% run off to make sure the salts don't build up.

water them so you get some runoff. It generally takes half as much water as you have soil to thoroughly drench it, so if you have 20 gallons of dry soil I would mix up 10 gallons of nutrients. A moisture meter is also a good thing to own. Letting the soil get drier is a good idea, but you don't want it to dry out completely.