Potting up vs. full repotting

Potting up vs. full repotting🙂 Most people pot up their plants instead of doing full repotting. Potting up means moving the plant with its root mass and soil mostly intact into a larger container and filling in around the soil mass with additional soil. Full repotting on the other hand includes the removal of all or part of the soil and pruning and removal of deffective roots. Examples are damaged or diseased roots, roots that are growing back towards the center of the root mass, encircling roots.⠀
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Potting up temporarily gives room to fine roots to grow and take water and nutrients, but roots in the old mass continue to grow and become increasigly restrictive to each other. You will also progresively need larger and larger containers for potting up, which will get difficult to handle, which also makes people increasingly reluctant to undertake potting up, let alone do full repotting which becomes increasingly difficult with each potting up.⠀
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Full repotting and root pruning provides conditions for a plant to reach its full potential under the conditions its in.⠀
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It's possible having beautiful plants for year without ever doing full repotting. But even if they manage to survive, they will not be reaching their full potential. There is a big difference in longevity of an average houseplant tree and for example of a bonsai tree. The difference in their life expectancy i.e. 5 years for a houseplant vs. 200 years for a bonsai tree is in the way the roots are treated 🙂⠀

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[chelseam]

Eeeee. May I ask if you always break up the root ball completely and if so is it because of root rot or infestation issue? Any time I've broken up a root ball to this extreme I've always had an issue with the plant going through extreme shock and dying shortly after vs. Gently removing it from the pot and tapping it to remove loose soil. On rare occasions I will slightly break it up but only if theres root rot or overly compacted roots but I keep it to a bare minimum just to loosen it.

[irenecaldwell]

That’s awesome what mixture of soul did you use, please and thank you!

[emmmuck]

How can I keep my hand clean like yours. Lol how come i do this without glove, dirt stucks and hard to clean. U seem to have invisible glove