[paradoxlost]

Originally Posted by Shmavis

Scale?

That's one factor for me.

You say you started 5 seeds or so before, and soon will start ‘some' more.

Let’s say you’re popping 30 regular seeds. Why would you want to start them in large containers when you don’t know the sex? Let’s say you end up with 15 males in large containers. What a waste, right? Even if you plan to reuse the soil, that’s a lot of unnecessary extra work.

Lots of other reasons as others have said. But this says it best:

Yea I mean 30 seeds in a 25 gallon is a bit much. Even one plant in a gallon bucket I feel like would be hard to deal with. In the sophies breath pot though we have 4 females. And they are all vigorous beasts. We're debating on what to do. We cloned them all. Probably just going to let them fight it out, seem to be encouraging each other at this point.

The 25 gallon we couldn't decide on what seeds to pop, so we put in a single clone.

Yea, idk, I mean I see the logic in that. But if you make a good soil mix, top dress with available nutrients, have a good fungal community going on, have a good cover crop community, keep the top soil moist, and water correctly I feel like that effect is negligible. If anything would just suck the nutrients out of that layer quicker, giving you less buffer against pH swings, etc.

[St. Phatty]

Originally Posted by positivity

I’m sure the commercial types could have a robot poke his finger in the dirt and a drone fly by and do pesticide foliars.

Yes, plant caretaker is one job that Shylock types will not want to spend money on - and so pursue automation.