We did it ourselves

Last year on a garden tour, we saw some self-watering containers and thought they were terrific!  By creating a water resevoir below the plants, you don't have to water everyday and the plants stay evenly moist.  Plus containers get hotter than the ground does.  While we can grow tomatoes with no problems whatsoever, we don't have the same luck with sweet peppers.  We generally get some green ones, but since we prefer red, yellow or orange, waiting for the green ones to ripen adds lots of days from planting to harvest - days we don't always get in MN.  So we thought warmer soil might help.

The woman at whose house we saw the containers was most generous in sharing information about them.  And of course you can find instructions online!  So after kind of forgetting about them over the winter (I'm sure many of you will understand why...), I thought of them again as things began to green.  I went and got supplies much later than I probably should have.  I thought about just buying them, but they're about $30 each, plus shipping - without dirt.  Making them ourselves came to more like $8-10 each, again without dirt. It probably took somewhere between 10-12 hours for the two of us to make 3 of them (of course, the third one took far less time than the first!), so judge for yourselves if you'd rather spend your time or your money.  There's a limit as to how much faster you'd get if you made more - some of the steps just take time. 

So what do you need?  Well, you can search online for these yourselves and find any number of ways to make them.   Some folks scrounge for everything, others buy parts.  The principle is the same, no matter what you use.  What we used was this:

• a big plastic tub - ours are 18 gallons - with a lid (try for one with flat sides - ours went in and out and that made cutting the screens exponentially harder)
• PVC piping
• plastic bottles (from potable liquids - don't use anything that isn't food grade!)
• black plastic bag
• slow release fertilizer
• potting soil - lots and lots of it

The basic idea here is that you use the lid to make a screen to divide the bin into upper and lower parts.  The plants go in the top part, and water in the lower.  The roots come down through the holes in the screen and get air this way and sometimes water - depending on water levels and how long the roots are.  You also put in what I'll call wicking tubes.  They sit in holes cut to fit them in the screen and move water between the two parts.  Holes or other openings let water in at the bottom, and it moves from there up through the dirt inside it to the top part of the bin.  This gives your plants a nice constant supply of water, which lets them grow better and avoid some of the problems of wet and dry cycles.  You add water to the resevoir through a tube from the top.


We've marked what needs cutting
 and starting drilling.

 We started by tracing circles around the bottles where we wanted the holes to go, plus another one around the PVC for the watering tube.  Then we used a 1/2" drill to put LOTS of holes in the lid, being careful to not put them on the edges of the circles or too close to where we thought we needed to cut the edge of the lid.


On this one, we cut holes
and then drilled!


 Our biggest problem was sizing the screens. We didn't realize just how much smaller the bins got toward the bottoms, or take into account the non-flat sides (see pictures further down).  So when we just cut the rim off the lid, the interior part ended up being far too large for where it needed to be in the bin, but we couldn't do a whole lot about it because of all the holes we'd already cut for the wicking tubes near the edges!   So we cut and trimmed as best we could.  Fortunately, we hadn't started the 3rd one by the time we figured this out, and it went much faster than the other two.  Still, it would have been far simpler if the sides had been flat, and a cinch if the bin was the same size all the way down!  It was my first time using a drill and was kinda fun. I still think it was easier to drill the holes before cutting the lid, as you could put the lid on the bin and just punch through it, as opposed to having to drill into something if the lid was just a flat piece of plastic.

Joe quickly cut five pieces of PVC about 5" long as supports for under the screen, and a piece somewhere around 2 feet long for the watering tube. He had to drill holes in the bottom of that so the water could get from the tube into the resevoir.  You could also, depending on what you use, simply cut an opening in the side of it, but it was easier to drill the PVC than cut an opening in it.  Be sure to wash out the PVC before using it - they told me that where I bought it.  He also drilled a small overflow hole in the bin's side, so we'd know when it was full. We made the wicking tubes for our first container from plastic popcorn containers. We cut them to the right height - not too hard - and then Joe drilled holes near the bottom so the water could move from the resevoir into the tube.  Now that was work - the plastic was kind of brittle and had a tendency to snap.  But he quickly figured out now to minmize that.   We came up with enough water bottles to do the other two, and those were much easier, as I could cut them to size with scissors and simply cut arches in the sides to let water in.  Took a fraction of the time.

Then we were ready to assemble. In the bottom went the supports, then the screen. 

We put the wicking tubes in the holes and added the watering tube.  Then came the dirt.  And when I said you need lots, I wasn't kidding.  We'd add some dirt, then water, then repeat.  That helps the process get started.

Dirt goes inside the wicking tubes - that part confused me for a while, as none of the videos or instructions I watched/read specified that.   Each bin took somewhere between 90 and 100 pounds of dirt!  Fortunately, we realized this soon enough that we weren't stuck trying to move a full one...  Once the bin was nearly full, we added the plants, along with some slow release fertilizer.  I don't use many chemicals in my gardens (I've never used any on tomatoes), but container grown stuff just needs it. 

We watered again, then cut a black (so it  holds the heat) plastic garbage bag to fit the bin, with openings for the plants and watering tube.  I hear red plastic is even better, but we didn't have any.  Last was the rim of the lid to hold it all in place, although I must confess we had to use a bit of duct tape, too, as the lids didn't close well.  We add water every few days and we'll see how our veggies grow!