Overwatering and Drainage

Geckoflora

Member
I recently installed a Mistking system for my panther chameleon's enclosure, and unfortunately it seems to be overwatering one of the pothos plants I have in there. I set up the system and a few days after I went out of town for a week with family members watching my lizards; when I got back last night I found my pothos is wilting quite a bit and some leaves are turning yellow, so I'm trying to figure out how I can fix my set up to keep it from getting waterlogged again while it (hopefully) recovers.

Currently, the pothos is inside of a little plastic pot with drainage holes in the bottom that sits instead of a slightly larger plastic pot with no holes, and the larger pot has holes punched through the top edge to secure it the cage wall.

Would it work to repot the pothos into the larger pot with no holes if I put a layer of gravel as a drainage layer on the bottom instead? Should I get a new pot completely? I don't have a lot of space to hang a much bigger pot, unfortunately.

Would it hurt the plant if I had to trim some of the roots off? I'm not a great plant owner and I haven't repotted this pothos since I got it (almost 2 years ago), so the roots have grown out of the drainage holes in the bottom of the little pot and might make it hard to extract the plant for repotting unless I trim them a bit.

I'd really appreciate any tips or ideas! Unfortunately I can't really just angle the mister away from this plant as the pothos sits near the top of the cage across from the mister head, and to be able to mist the majority of the cage I need it aimed towards this pothos at least partially.
 
This looks like word salad but ill get through this...

I assume you have drainage...
Repot the potho so that half the bottom of the pot is gravel (not sand). You can use the same large pebble rock you have all over the top of the plant so that the cham/food cant get to the dirt(you do have the tops covered with gravel right?).
Now you have 2 choices based on your drainage. You can either not have a base to the pot, and have it drain directly into the drainage system, or you can just make sure the bottoms over flow line in lower that the gravel line.

I really dont like plant pots with bottoms, the end up constantly filled with stagnant water, and if you free range the food, you end up with stagnant water with dead crickets...

I have 3 different photo setups and they all work great.

1) potho is on top of the tank, never gets watered, and get all its water from the misting and the roots sitting in the drainage pan.
2) potho in a wash bucket sitting in the drainage pan, holes drilled in the bottom, bottom half filled with gravel, then plant/dirt then more gravel. Its always sitting in 1-2" of water and gets rained on all day.
3) The hydro potho. It literally is just end cuts of potho trimmings, that just lives in the drainage pan.


Any yes you can utterly decimate the root system with extreme prejudice if its getting misted several times a day :)
 
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