Since we like to travel, I was afraid to plant my vegetables in pots because they require constant water in this dry climate, but pots seemed like a much better option to me than putting a lot of work into a raised bed, only to have my gardening undertaking fail. So I started researching self watering gardens.
There are so many videos on the internet about self watering gardens and they all use a slightly different technique. So we took a little bit of advice from each of them and constructed our own self watering pot. I wanted something pretty, but still functional.
The technique we decided to use creates a platform in the pot. The soil will sit on the platform and the water will be beneath it. We used a lid from an old rubber maid container to make our platform, then drilled holes for our wicking bottles.
You can see our platform in the pot with the wicking bottles in place. It isn't ready yet, but it gives you an idea of how it will look under the soil.
We drilled some holes in the bottles so that the water in the bottom of the planter would fill them.
Then we cut off the tops of the bottles so we could fill them with soil.
Here it is again. The bottles now have holes in the bottoms of them and the tops are cut off. We then drilled a hole in the pot just below the platform. This will allow any extra water to drain out so it can't drown the plants even with heavy rains.
We then soaked potting mix (not potting soil) and packed it into our bottles. These bottles will wick the water from the bottom of the pot up through the packed soil, and into the soil in the pot.
We placed the bottles back under the platform and filled the top of the pot with damp potting mix and planted our basil and chives.
If everything works as planned, the soil in the bottles will continue to wick the water up from the bottom and keep the soil moist.
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