Garden

[Twins Mom]

In cleaning up plants from pots today, I noticed how shallow the root systems are for my begonias, vincas, and coleus. 

Is this typical?  I have these big tall pots which require lots of soil, and so little goes down.  Any insight?  

[Kachina624]

@Twins Mom    You don't have to fill your tall pots with dirt.  Any sort of filler will do.  I used to use a pot if Styrofoam peanuts.  Now that we don't get them anymore, I save chunks of Styrofoam, break them up and use them.  You could use gravel or lightweight volcanic stone, anything you have, then add several inches of soil. 

[gardenman]

Shallow roots are pretty normal for most plants. Even many trees. In the natural world, the topsoil is typically just a few inches thick and since that's where the nutrients tend to lie, that's where the plant roots tend to go. You may have an 18" deep pot filled with wonderful soil, but the plants will do what they've always done and concentrate their roots where they think the soil is best and that's the top few inches.

[mousiegirl]

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@Twins Mom wrote:

In cleaning up plants from pots today, I noticed how shallow the root systems are for my begonias, vincas, and coleus. 

Is this typical?  I have these big tall pots which require lots of soil, and so little goes down.  Any insight?  

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@Twins Mom   Begonias can grow two feet tall, gradually, so I adjust the pot size to their growth, and I don't find them to have as large a root system as other plants.

[Growing]

Many houseplants or potted plants like to have somewhat crowded roots. So if we repot them into huge pots, they will have the shallow root system or spend their entire time making leaves and not flowers or fruit. So forever house plants need to be in smaller containers at first. But yes, my outside begonias are planted into the same pot every year. It is about 12" round. I remove the actual plant right before we have our first freeze and shake out the roots over the pot so the soil goes back into the pot. They do not have deep or huge roots. I will say that I planted lavendar in my tall planting bed and they had huge root system. I am giving up on those because we have had two rainy summers and they have all done gangbusters at first and then died off in late summer when the rain came. I got them from a tiny plant like you'd buy for a tomato plant size to grow in one summer to a small bush and the two varieties I have tried have both died off. One is now half dead and I ran out of steam to deal with it. Couldn't pull it out of the bed because the root was so deep. I will try again in Spring 2022!