Plants. Those generally-leafy, yet still quite needy organisms that rate quite low on the personality scale. I'm a fan. We have a lot in common.
I live in a loft apartment in Silicon Valley. It doesn't get a huge amount of natural light. It's really down to two windows at the front of the place. I also travel for work and perhaps pleasure from time to time. Not super conducive to maintaining plants. Especially the ones I like to have around.
I've put something together that seems to be:
- Viable in the small space that I have
- Relatively water efficient
- Low maintenance
- Making pretty good use of the small amount of direct sunlight I have
Olla Pots
Firstly, I'm watering the plants using a system of Olla Pots rather than a drip feed system or by pouring water over them. This helps to drastically minimise water loss through evaporation, and over watering. The pots I'm using are these ones, if you're interested, but there are plenty out there.
Olla Pots in some form or another have been around for centuries and work off a simple premise. They're terracotta pots that you bury near your plants, fill with water and seal. Being porous, as the moisture outside the pot disappears from the soil (as the plants drink it), the water inside the pot leaches out into the soil keeping it moist for the plants. Essentially the plants are watered at the same rate they consume. Given that the pots are subterranean, there is very little moisture lost to evaporation. Well... there is now. More on that shortly.
The pots I have are completely sealed, with the tops not being porous and they're fed by gravity and a series of 4mm tubes.
Here's a photo of the planters, with the plants, soil and pots:
Note a few things:
- The shiny (non-porous) tops with holes for attaching the tubing.
- The fact that in this picture there's still some of the porous terracotta visible above the soil.
Evaporation
After putting this in place, I was going through a lot more water than I expected. Pulling the pots out of the soil, I could see that they were all damp apart from the very dry top third. My guess was that it was evaporation, so I added a bunch more soil to properly cover the pots. That seems to have done the trick.
I don't have any pictures of the half-wet/half-dry pots, but these two show the pot (with its tubing) properly buried, and what it looks like when I pull it out of the soil:
And:
Because nobody likes their pots to dry out.
Gravity and Sunlight
As I said earlier, I also wanted to make the best use I could of the available sunlight. I also don't have any kind of running water in that part of the house and frankly I'd rather not have this connected to the water supply in case I spring a leak.
So I went vertical and have a plastic reservoir for gravity-feeding the olla pot system below:
I had to MacGyver the linkage between the tubing and the reservoir ($5 from Target), but it works un como jefe and with about 1.25 gallons of water, the pressure isn't enough to bust a leak.
The Result
The whole thing seems to be going quite well. The Italian basil I planted probably needs more sun than I'm getting at the moment -- I'll probably end up planting things according to Southern Hemisphere seasons -- and there's a few bugs starting to take more of an interest than I'd like. I'll probably plant some stuff to deter those. But the Thai Basil, Rosemary, Tomato, Japanese Eggplant are all going really well. I've also got a couple of garlic shoots popping up.
Anyway, I hope that this has been of some interest to some of you. Feel free to hit me up with comments, questions and the like.
Other Miscellaneous Points
- I had also looked at the idea of using some rope threaded through some tubing (to avoid evaporation) as a way to wick water into the soil in a similar fashion. I may still try that out. Perhaps with a different set of plants.
- Still/Standing water isn't good for anyone except mosquitoes and dengue fever. Keep it somewhat sealed and free from bugs.
- A gravity fed system like mine can quickly become a vacuum, which can make it difficult for the water to find its way all the way down. I have a tap on the bottom to bleed the lines periodically and I have a cloth over the hole I add the water to the reservoir through rather than sealing it completely.
- I may raise the frame up on blocks to give the bottom planter just a little more access to the window.
- The window is actually almost exactly twice the width of the planter frame. As the weather starts to change here, I may install a complete second vertical garden right next to it.