Moisture tester

I recently bought a digital moisture tester which gives the basic "dry", "normal" or "wet" feedback. Before I bought it I just used the finger in the soil testing method.

One of the first things I noticed about this way of testing for moisture is that whereas my old method would have had me watering when the top of the soil was dry, my new method is telling me that although the top is dry, the bottom can still be very moist/wet.

Which brings me to my question. If your plant only has a smallish shallow root system and you wait for the bottom to read "dry", then this could be problematic for the plant and it won't be happy at all. By the time the bottom begins to dry out, the top, where the shallow root system is, would be completely bone dry!!

For those of you who use these testers, how do you determine when to water, especially when the plant hasn't yet filled out the whole of the pot with it's roots?

 

I don't have one of those meters (I use a combination of lifting the por to feel the wirght and sticking a finger into the soil) but maybe you could put the probe in just as deep as where you think the plant roots go down to.
Another tip is not to over-pot plants into pots a lot bigger than the root ball, but pot on gradually, so that there's never a lot of excess compost outside/below where the roots reach to.

 

I have found that the 'weigh -it' technique is most satisfactory; and with the (reluctant) move to peat free composts, that a regime of immersion watering upon weight testing , rather than wetting from the top on visual , seems to be most effective. Have you noticed that the latest pots in use in plant production seem to have less holes but they are much bigger ?,presumably to rapid drain.
@gks

 

No, the pots we use are still the same. Unless they are only introducing these type of pots with less holes for the retail sector.