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