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[hereje]

Seeing as how many people grow plants and harvest roots i though i would share my method

Usually to harvest roots one must unpot the plant then attack it with a box cutter to get your roots...


Here is how i do it
Buy two shallow sterilite containers from walmart (mine are about 3" deep)
Buy a 1" hole saw for your drill
Buy a bag of organic potting mix
Buy a small bag of pea gravel (mine is 1.5-2.0 cm rocks)

Drill a ton of 1" holes in the bottom of one container then pack in potting mix
Poke holes on the sides of the second container about 1-2mm above the bottom then add 1" pea gravel
Put the soil container inside the gravel container

The roots will work their way out of the soil container into the rock container below
Lift soil container - trim roots - replace
You wont get all the roots at once but it dont kill the plant either

Dont know if this will work for every kind of plant but i tend to have good luck this way
The reason you put holes in the side of the rock container and not the bottom is so that it leaves a
 millimeter or two of standing water at the bottom of the rocks so the rocks and roots dont dry out

1 Like fairdinkumseeds likes this.

[PermieGing]

Wow that sounds quite simple and intuitive

Thanks for posting!

Edit: i was literally wondering how to sustainably and ethically harvest roots earlier today; the above seems to do this

[Mandrake]

I've used a similar trick involving a smaller gridded pot (the type used for hydroponics) inside of a larger pot. When you transplant, the rootball goes inside of the gridded pot and the space between pots is filled with perlite, or another equivalent substrate that will be easy to clean. This of course will ask for nutrients when you water the perlite frame, but in the next season all the roots that grew through the grid will be easily harvested/pruned.

It's pretty similar to your idea, it just saves you the drilling since the aero-pot is already gridded.

Thanks for the tip,

Mandrake

2 Likes Caium and fairdinkumseeds like this.

[hereje]

Mandrake - that sounds like a good idea aswell and a lot cleaner - the way i do it is very messy because some soil aloways falls through and you end up with muddy rocks - after some time the roots are dence enough to hold the soil in place but untill that time its a mess

[Caium]

I like it, a combination of layering with this sounds perfect. Thanks for sharing.

[Saros]

I tried this method out on a few trees this year. I used 5 gal buckets as the soil container and a 20 something gal tub as the outter perlite container. I'm moving all my plants inside for the winter now so last week I pulled the two containers apart to begin moving them inside and to see what grew out into the perlite. It was a struggle getting them apart after 6 months of letting them get their roots into every nook and cranny of the perlite. They even found their way out of the drainage holes in the tub and started growing firmly into the earth below.

Some things that I learned from this:
-Let the perlite dry out before trying to harvest. I made the mistake of trying to loosen it up by spraying into it with a hose on the first attempt. It was very messy and the perlite stuck to everything. The last two pots had thoroughy dried out so once I freed the root ball, all I had to do was shake it real well and much of the dry perlite fell right off.

-Smack the tub all the way around before trying to lift the inner pot out. This helps loosen things up and make things easier. (Though it's still a struggle)

-Trim the upper portion of the tree before starting. Otherwise it puts up a fight and stats smacking you in the face.. depending on the type of tree, that could be very painful:)

5 Likes Caium, Frog Pajamas, prasada, MadPlanter and hereje like this.

[marshmellow]

That's amazing, what kind of tree is that?

[Saros]

I believe it is Mimosa Tenuiflora. Though I started them almost 2 years ago and I'm not 100% certain about whether my vendor had them ID'd correctly. However, they do look like the younger MT that I started this year. So at least that matches up:)

[marshmellow]

Awesome have to get me some of them to, just got about thirty fifteen gallon pots for free and they will be perfect for this.
Do you put them back in the tub after harvast or just in the buckets for winter?

[Caium]

Well done Saros! You find that perlite easy to remove from the roots or is it compact?

[Saros]

Marshmellow: These will remain only in the 5gal buckets for the winter due to space constraints. I have to bring these guys indoors for 5-6 mo of the year. So I prune them back and try to keep them happy until they go back out and into the tubs of perlite again in the spring.

Odara: Thank you. The perlite wasn't compacted hardly at all. The roots held it all together at first, but all that was needed to remove most of it was some gentle shaking and massaging of the root mass. At least that was the case when the the trees weren't watered for a couple weeks and the perlite dried out thoroughly.  It was a whole other ball of wax when I tried to use water to remove it. That was a mistake and it was a time consuming, tedious process to serparate them. I used about an inch of pine bark nuggets in the bottom of the tub to prevent perlite from washing out and to help with drainage. The roots really worked their way into and through the nuggets. They seemed to like it, but it was hard to remove the roots from them. I might try something like expanded clay pellets next year. It may not be necessary at all to use anything other than Perlite in there.

[hereje]

Very nice to see that it works with a tree ive only ever done it with small plants like desmanthus and henbane - did you get a weight on the roots you got ?

[Saros]

The average weight per tree was a little over 200g fresh. There was still some bits of perlite and pine bark that made it in there so that number may be slightly inflated.

[hereje]

Not bad at all - when using rocks its very easy to clean off the roots but in the case of a tree thats unrealistic as im sure it would end up being many hundreds of pounds of gravel - i wonder if this would work with just a spacer between the two tubs and no intermediate substrait

[Saros]

It might if you could  keep  the roots from drying out in that space. That sounds like a good aeroponics experiement:) Wouldn't get much simpler to clean than that!