I think you understand. The fabric breathes...and thus requires more watering. Wicking action "pulls" water down along with gravity effects.

I bought my daughter a hanging flower arrangement kinda like that last summer. It hung verticaly and there were holes/slits cut in various places in the bag, this is where the petunias grew from. It was quite small when I bought it but as it grew and became fuller it looked like a solid masss of petunias. I have also seen it with moss roses as well as ivy geraniums. Cute idea.

Hello all, I just want to update this thread and talk about my results in case other people are thinking of doing something like this. I was away for the ENTIRE winter. I did not do anything to the bags except just surround them in dead leaves. I did cover even the canes in leaves, but they ended up getting blackspot after rain so I decided to pull them off of the roses themselves. I came back to my roses covered in solid ice (lots and lots of snow froze over time) and some canes were even snapped. This past week weather has been very warm reaching to 60 at some point here in zone 5a. I came outside to throw trash out and saw promising signs of new growth (they are still partially covered in ice!) and green that was hiding under all that ice. There is absolutely no rose that is dead. All have survived. Any apartment dwellers in a similar situation I encourage this method. If you do not have a trench-like area maybe you can build a wooden barrier/box to place them in to shield against wind chill. Overwintering in grow bags is completely possible given the right circumstances!

The fabric pot sellers say that the roots will be air pruned, so there will be no root bounding or root circling issue. This is not so. Containers (fabric or other) designed to (hopefully) "air-prune" roots do so by virtue of the highly aerated pot walls which causes desiccation of the soil and roots at the perimeter of the root/soil mass. Just as removing the growing tip of a branch (the apical meristem) forces new branching to occur proximal to (behind) the pruning cut, death of root tips forces new root branching proximal to necrotic root tips, so you end up with roughly the same amount of root congestion. If you consider top growth occurs subsequent to an increase in root mass large enough to support any increase in volume of the canopy, whether or not the plant is in a conventional container or a container that comes with the claim of no circling roots or root congestion, both of these undesirable conditions occur and become progressively more limiting as the canopy (and therefore the root mass) increases in volume. The fabric growing pots/bags don't last forever, so you'll need to replace them from time to time, and it will be no problem separating the bag from the root/soil mass. I saw a video on Youtube that said that the roots got sewn into the fabric and that removing those eventually killed the trees. Don't believe everything you see/ hear/ read. Any roots that become entangled in the walls of fabric or plastic pots can be pruned. The person responsible for providing the information you referred to is operating at beyond the limits of his/her knowledge. I do full repots on over 200 trees per year, which includes bare-rooting; root pruning, during which I often remove more than 75% of the tree's root mass; and, a change of grow medium. Before/after images of a couple of repots: Buxus (spc. unknown): Acer palmatum: This Japanese maple ^^^ was collected from the landscape as a seedling, which means the odds of it having a very ugly root mass were near 100% (which is inappropriate for a bonsai tree); so I had to air layer the tree above it's original roots. You can see the tourniquet wire I used to determine the ht at which the new roots would grow. I also made sure the new roots were perfectly spaced around the tree's circumference. This a Carpinus coreana (Korean hornbeam) that illustrates how I did that part. The evenly spaced holes above the zip ties are filled with an insoluble rooting aid before the tree is transplanted. The constriction provided by the zip ties stops the downward flow of photosynthate (food) and a growth hormone (auxin) which collects in tissue above the constriction and ensures almost 100% success. I've strayed a bit from the topic while illustrating why removing a few roots represents no threat to a containerized tree's viability, but I thought you might find it interesting. Years ago, I posted a thread re Long Term Care of Trees in Containers. It should have lots of useful information you can rely on. Al