Jose you could also use air/light to root prune. I use RootBuilder and make my own bottomless pots adding panels to them as needed or based on the tree requirements. For example avocados have a wide shallow root system so they get about 55 gal. pots. If a roll is cost prohibited to ship I'd recommend the white fabric pots which happens to be one of the staff's favorite grow pots. She lives in Alabama which gets quite hot in the summer. The design requires less water and the white helps reflect the sun's rays.
Open up the photo of the Moro blood orange. There's two white thick roots about 7:30 and 5:00 growing into the native soil. Perimeter roots are almost none existent and there's no root spin out.
http://tropicalfruitforum.com/index.php?topic=7511.50
BTW, some of those trees are/were (had a hard freeze, heater malfunction) pruned to 10'. Thanks to the freeze we recently processed at least 300 blood oranges, 50 Meyer lemons and put up some incredible batches of orange marmalade, gallons of juice, ice cubes, etc. Hombre, if you've never done orange marmalade you are missing it.
Good luck!
Hi Mark! That marmalade looks really good amigo, I have orange trees here, Tarocco Rosso and Maltese, both close to Moro. I must try marmalade, here is quite popular bitter orange marmalade, but I do prefer sweet. I saw what happened to your greenhouse few weeks ago, sorry for that, but you found the best way to keep going
Regarding pots just today I planted one Maha mango into a 4 gallons airpot. I really don't need to make such an amazing setting like yours (your fruit porn thread is in my bookmarks
) because my trees will grow outside. What I'm interested in is developing a very good root system before planting them in their definitive spot. For that I can use the cooper painting and save some water, which here is expensive and scarce (we are facing the second consecutive year of drought, and I'm afraid that 2018 is going to be way worse than 2017). I have plenty of plastic pots already that I gonna paint and reuse. Those fabric pots though seem really interesting and they are much cheaper than air-pots. Do they do a similar effect on root system than airpots and cooper?
the $1 dolla-store has several sizes of containers
i use a knife and punch holes in the side.
(wiggle the knife a bit to open it up)
ive had great success with this.
if you need 1 or 2 containers and have the $%, get root-pruning pots,
but, i needed lots, this was much cheaper.
i have a couple of fabric containers,
and for some reason they stay damp and get moldy.
i am always sitting them in the sun, on top of something
to let them dry.
maybe this is good for Jabos in the summer...
Thanks for the tip. A friend of mine told me that plastic fruit boxes also work great as air-pots. Problem is the waste of water. By using copper paint I can keep my watering rate and keep my water bill under tolerable levels
Bottom paints for boats are available in almost countries. The copper bottom paints eliminate algae and other marine growths. Lots of different versions and could be found in a ship store or other port facilities.
Yes, you're right I found that kind of paint here, the trades I found are quite expensive though, between 42 and 55 dollars 0.20 gallons. For that money I can make more copper paint that I gonna need in many years. Anyway it would be interesting to know if anybody tried this paint for fruit trees and got good results.