Savage Garden: making my big guns

So I tend to go out of town every once in a while during the summer. Unfortunately, not watering your plants for four days to a week and a half is not good for them at all.

There are a variety of self-watering planters for sale, but they either tend to be too small to hold big veggies or too expensive for me to get more than one. But the internet always provides.

There’s a royal ton of schematics for self-watering planters out there from various local-farming advocates, so I sort of cobbled a few of them together based on what what I already had and what I could get for free (I’m friends with a lot of science people who have an infinite supply of 5-gallon buckets and people who buy the big plastic bins of kitty litter, for example, so those are what I used. If you have a lot of plastic rectangle storage bins left over from college, I would use those).

I couldn’t find a step-by-step picture book-type explanation for idiots, though, because I do best with projects when I’m not left to improvise, so I decided to make one. It’s a slightly more complicated than “one bucket in another bucket,” but that’s the basis. It’s eventually gonna look like this (if it were made of of crappy neon lines):

The bottom bucket’s job is to hold water. It has a drainage hole in the side so that the water level never rises above the soil in the top bucket, cuz that will drown the roots. The wicking cup (just a classic red solo cup cut full of holes, in my case) is full of soil and is a bridge between the top and bottom buckets. Physics (or something) will slowly draw the water up from the bottom bucket through the cup as the top dries out, so you can leave it unwatered for a few days and it’ll be fine, plus you can’t overwater it. You refill the reservoir through the watering tube sticking out the top. Simple enough? Well, here’s how you do it.

YOU WILL NEED:

• two five-gallon containers (five gallons is pretty much the minimum for growing big veggies like tomatoes)
• a drill OR a nail and a lot of patience
• about two feet of rubber tubing about an inch in diameter
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about an inch in diameter (you can get these in the plumbing section of the hardware store) OR a 1″ hole saw drill bit
• a plastic cup with a base diameter of about 2″
• EITHER a piece of copper tube about two inches in diamter OR a 2″ hole saw drill bit
• A plastic garbage bag
• an exacto knife or scissors
• potting mix
• seeds or seedlings

OK, so you've got a top bucket and a bottom bucket. The top bucket's base is going to get one big hole for the solo cup wicking device, one medium hole for the watering tube and a whole bunch of small holes for drainage. The bottom bucket only gets one small hole in its side for drainage. I'm painting my bottom buckets yellow, but this is only necessary if they're visible and you have pissy neighbors

For the top bucket: the copper tube gets heated up to poke a hole for the water tube

Stack your buckets, then measure how long the tube needs to be to reach the bottom

Unstack the buckets, and start heating up the large copper tube to make the large hole in the middle of the top bucket for the solo cup wicking thing

Now drill the base of the top bucket full of lots of evenly-spaced holes.

OK, top bucket, you're done for the moment.

Stack the buckets again, because you need to figure out where the top bucket's base is resting so you can drill a little drainage hole in the bottom bucket right below that so the soil won't actually ever be IN the water, just sucking it up through a plastic cup. It occurs to me now that it would be easier to just stick a ruler in the big hole. But what I did was measure how much of the top bucket was sticking out...

...then measure that distance minus about a quarter inch up from the base to mark the spot

This picture was taken before I located my drill under some stuff in the broom closet. I recommend using a drill, as poking a bunch of holes in plastic buckets with nails heated over a burner takes a really long time, makes your apartment smell really bad and probably also gives you cancer.

Solo cup, my old friend

Cut four vertical slits around the cup

Yup, four.

Pokin' some holes, pokin' some holes

Cut through the top brim of the cup and curl it up so it's more tube-ish than cup-ish

Tuck the cup into the hole so the base of the cup touches the bottom of the outside bucket

Dirt time! Take them wherever you want to keep them, they are going to be heavy

Pack the cup full of dirt first, then fill up the bucket and plant your seedling

Water it from the top this one time to get everything in order, but after this just pour water into the tube with a funnel

Happy plants!

One thing I forgot to take pictures of: cut a piece of garbage bag a little bigger than the circumference of the top bucket. Cut an X for the plant to fit through and an X for the water tube to fit through, then fasten the plastic around the top like a lid with the seedling and water tube poking out. This prevent the water from evaporating as quickly and keeps bad bugs out.

OK, I didn’t just forget to take pictures. I forgot to do it. But I recommend that you do it.