Air pruning self-watering plant pot

prusaprinters

<p>This planter is designed along similar principles as the "Air-pot" product,<br>although it uses a different mechanism. The standard version has an outer<br>diameter of 108mm, intended to fit inside cut-down 2l coke bottles. With the<br>addition of some cotton ribbon hanging to a reservoir it can keep your soil<br>moist, something I found quite challenging with normal Air-pots as they'd dry<br>the soil out quickly.</p><p>I find this combination of air-pruning and self watering works very well.</p><p>If you're not familiar with air-pruning basically plants, especially trees, can<br>grow really long inefficient roots, especially when they're in a container as<br>the roots will hit a wall and curve around. Air pruning systems are designed to<br>make sure a root doesn't curve, instead it hits the wall, gets exposed to air,<br>and the plant decides to branch the root a big higher up. This leads to very<br>dense root networks composed of short roots, and means your plant will be a lot<br>better at extracting resources from the soil (plant food is highly recommended).<br>It also means that plants generally won't get sick from outgrowing their pot,<br>their growth will just be stunted.</p><p>It's written in openscad so you can customize the sizes for your exact<br>situation, although the standard is designed to fit into a cut down 2 litre pop<br>bottle.</p><p>I also have a version of this pot I've designed for bonsai trees, it's larger<br>and since I can't put it in a pop bottle it comes with a water reservoir plate.</p><p>It's my hope that the air-pruning pot's root management will work well with<br>bonsai, removing the need to manually trim their roots. It's as big as I could<br>fit on the bed of my ultimaker clone, which is still maybe a bit small for<br>bonsai.</p>