Perlite and fabric pots

[Rik]

Simple question… those of you that grow in fabric pots, do you put a bed of perlite at the bottom under your soil/coco? The fabric pots are so airy that it feels like drainage issues are almost impossible if you’re using decent soil, and it’s starting to feel like the perlite at the bottom of my fabric pots is encouraging too much run off, making it difficult to keep beneficial nutrients and microbes in my soil. What do you guys think?

[Farmbuck]

Good question I mix roughly 30% of perlite in my 5 gallons fabric pot. Never do a run off... well it's my choice.

[9fingerleafs]

I use coco only. 7 gal pots. Have 40 at all times. Never had issues. You just have to water more often in fabric pots. I Don’t do runoff, only sometimes by mistake but I try not to

[Rik]

Every time I hear about the amount you grow I’m blown away. You must be working non stop! I know you do this professionally, do you have any assistance or are you on your own?

[9fingerleafs]

I’m on my own. It’s not that big compared to comercial amateur ops. But yeah lots of time involved

[dphipps1020]

Definitely a lot of time. I'm down to 20 right now myself. Having to downsize a little bit, unfortunately. I don't miss that many for an indoor grow. I've actually been trying to train them more and veg them longer now that I have a little weed saved up. More than likely I will be cutting it down to about 12 plants total. It seems like a lot, but if you enjoy doing it sometimes it's easy to get carried away lol

[Rik]

So but do you guys put a bed of pure perlite at the bottom? I’m not talking about the perlite mixed in, which I think is universally understood to be a good idea.

[Farmbuck]

My answer Rik is no I don't do a bed.

[azorahai]

I suspect it wouldn't make much of a difference in terms of how much water runs off the bottom of the pot with or without a bed of perlite. I always add a layer of expanded clay pebbles to my plastic pots, but that's just because it can sometimes collect water at the bottom, which isn't much of an issue with fabric pots (well, and also to encourage air pruning of the roots, which also isn't necessary with fabric pots).

[gbauto]

When I run the 3 gal bags with coco/perlite mix on my pheno runs in a DTW tray, I like to keep the bags on lifters to allow the bottom of the bags to drain.
When I ran them directly on the tray, salts would accumulate on the bottom of the bags.

[dphipps1020]

I don't do a bed of perlite because of exactly what you said, I don't want to run the nutrients out of my soil. I also just let the bags soak up the runoff water in the trays, even though you're not really supposed to. If you have the perlite in the bottom, your soil won't be able to soak the nutrients back up and you will lose your nutrients. Just my method and why.