How to Build the BEST Self Wicking Containers! DIY Self Watering Tubs

These two pipes and the water tank created at the bottom of this or what make the whole system work, so they have to have the pipe here or something to maintain the air space. What's up, guys? I'm Daniel from Arms Family Homestead and we're here today. I'll be here in the high tunnel setting up I think 18 more

self

-absorbing bath

tubs

now this was an idea I had from Leon Sloane and Kingston Oklahoma Leon, if you follow my channel you know Leon, but this is his idea, not mine. I'm just going to steal it and use it because it works magically, so Leon has a channel called gardening with Leon and I'll leave a link to his video, but the concept here is to

build

a

self

-absorbing tub that will hold water in the soil. up and they absorb themselves, they water themselves, you really only have to water your plants once a week or so.

Now I built a couple of these a couple of weeks ago and showed you that process: one grows beets and the other grows carrots. now and they don't match your black

tubs

, but there are two, the first two that I built and then we are going to put together 18 more today for a total of 20, so what goes on the bottom is a perforated pipe, you could use coffee cans of a gallon. This is actually a drain pipe like if you were using a French drain, so it's a pretty thin wall 6 inch pipe and we're going to put two of those on the bottom to show you that process.

I have to cut them all and then landscape fabric many people ask what type of landscape fabric to use, how do you shape it into the tub shape, it doesn't have to be the tub shape, you use a sheet of landscape fabric that It's three feet by four feet and you put it on those two pipes, put it on the bottom and then fill it with dirt. Now Houston and I made the trip to see Leon to get more tubs and this goes, Holden beauty, right there, so well said, that's what you say. So all the time in Houston I made the trip to Kingston and Leon hooked us up with some amazing potting mix.

If you are near southern Oklahoma, northern Texas and need potting mix in bulk. Leon can connect you, the man bought a factory. he has semi-loads and the like of these beautiful things, so it will be a long morning with a lot of work. I'm going to mix this stuff with a little bit of my own compost to fill in the gaps and bulk it up a little more. I'll make sure I have enough to go as far as I want so I don't have to make another trip to Kingston to buy more, but anyway, we're going to

build

some things during the week and tubs today, these two pipes and the water. reservoir created at the bottom of this or what makes the whole system work so you have to have the tubing here or something to maintain the air space that's why I said you could use gallon cans you go to your school , your local school and get the 1 Gallon Vegetable Cans that they are probably going to throw away.

You could place them here. When you drill the hole, you drill a hole five inches high because the pipe is six inches and that creates a little bit of air space inside these pipes and that allows. Plant roots don't drown, so if you just put water in the bottom and didn't have room for air, it would absorb too much water and you wouldn't have air there to prune your roots. So as your plants grow, you'll have landscape fabric here, but as your plants grow, they'll get to where they are, the soil absorbs the water and then you have your air space there, which keeps everything from filling up. too saturated, it is a perfect self-absorbing bathtub.

I just had to cut out all the landscape fabric and put it here the other day, when I made those first two barrels, I had two pieces of old style ground cover that Leona had made. specifically for that purpose a couple of years ago and they were shaped like a bag, they had actually sewn them together and some people notice that, but I want you to understand that it is not necessary to have a piece of fabric shaped like a bag. I cut a three by four square and I'm just going to push it around the tubes, the main thing is that I want to cover these ends.

I don't want any dirt getting in here, so as I was pushing the fabric down, I held it over the ends like this. It's going to be like a bag where it's going to sit in the water tank so I'm just going to push it in like I said and tuck it in at the ends and when you do that you might have some pieces sticking out. no big deal, it doesn't have to fit perfectly around the edge because you have two pockets on each side, tuck this around the ends of the pipe, no dirt will get into the pipe and you have two areas for where the dirt will sit in its reservoir of water, don't overthink it, keep it simple so it's very important not to forget to drill a hole in the side because remember these pots don't have holes in the bottom, we want to rent a water tank to stay here so the roots can absorb and the soil can absorb moisture, so you have to have a water reservoir and we're going to measure five inches from the bottom and I have a half inch trowel here and we're just going to drill a hole five inches up from a hole.

Now the real work begins, so what I'm going to do is take and mix, make my own mix, my own mix, so I have Leon's potting mix that I bought and this is not soil, this is not topsoil, this It's my own compost that I made, it's probably over a year old and now I have it from an old pile, but it was clean from my goat. barn, so goat manure, hay, straw, wood shavings, all kinds of good stuff and maybe even some vegetables from the garden, grass clippings, leaves of all kinds, so I'm going to mix it up just to get this stuff there a little further away.

I'm going to mix in some of my own compost. What you don't want to do is use topsoil. Don't make these tubs. Just go out and find garden soil and put it there, it will become too compacted. You want something light. and spongy with a lot of organic material in there you can add peat moss or shredded leaves or if you want a lot of organic material to absorb the water you want to compact because then it will just form that hard crust and you won't ever absorb the moisture we have all my tubs full of soil the next step you can't forget its fertilization if you meet Leon and he tells you anything about gardening, the only thing he will tell you is that you don't have to feed your plants every day, but it is very important to feed them on the days you eat, so while we have really good soil here, it's still very important to go ahead and fertilize and we'll use a combination of fertilizers the first one is called sustainable it's a four six four so it's not like a triple 20 or 10 20 30 it's a four six four it's an organic fertilizer León tells me that it is made from composted turkey feathers but I would believe him I just haven't found that information on the bag anywhere that we will use per tub now here what we are going to do per tub, we will use 1/2 cup of sustainer and the second fertilizer is AC mineral so it's like evaporated sea water so it adds tons of trace elements to your soil so we combine feeding with these two and then when we water we will use another fertilizer which is a water soluble fertilizer called natural source and we'll get to that later, but okay. now we are going to add 1/2 cup.

I brought my wife's measuring cups outside. She'll probably get angry, but half a cup of sustenance and a quarter cup of sea mineral per cup and we don't just want to sprinkle it on. on top and leave it, we're going to work it several inches into the soil because we want the soil, we want the nutrients to be at the bottom where the root zone is and now we're on the last step before we're ready to plant. and that is adding our PVC pipe to bring water to these plants to the reservoirs at the bottom, so the main thing is that we are not going to water directly from above and let all the water be absorbed, we want the water to be down. here in our warehouse, so we cut PVC pipe, that's the only thing.

I don't have enough today. I only have three and then you know a lot more so I'm going to have to buy some PVC pipes but this one is one inch. PVC pipe and you see how it is cut at an angle, it is very important to cut one end at the angle, it doesn't have to be both ends, but when you cut paper, you cut it at an angle, there is no reason to level it. so you're going to slide this down between the landscape fabric and the side of the tub, you don't want to put it on the ground, you want it to go down between the fabric and the side of the tub so that when you fill it with water, you go right to the bottom , it's not too complicated.

I mean, you want an angle so that when it sits on the bottom, the water can still come out. If you cut it flat, the water won't be able to escape. from the bottom of the pipe so cut it at an angle and then just slide it to the bottom of the tub and then when you fill it you can fill it from right here you can put the water hose here and fill it. up and bring water to the bottom so it can start to be absorbed and that's all there is to do. These tubs are super easy to build.

There's not much to do. One thing I will say: make sure you get commercial quality landscaping. fabric, don't just buy cheap stuff at Walmart, things won't last over time, they'll fall apart, you'll have to redo your tubs within a year; They are commercial grade landscape fabrics and be sure to feed those plants. I'll give a little description. I will put a link in the description box below to Amazon. I know for a fact that you can buy that sustainable fertilizer on Amazon. I'll see if I can find a good quality Sea brand. Mineral to add and follow Leon's advice and every day you eat, feed your plants because they have to eat too, so anyway guys that's all I have for today, I built eight teenage tubs and no record time by no means, it's been a long The day has been a long project, but anyway we made it and I'm going to plant some crops and I'll be very soon, maybe I'll have some plants ready to go that need to be put in soil.

Excuse me, I have some plants. that needs to be put in the ground from time to time we are going to start a bunch more seeds, we have the Hoss tools, the seedlings from the seed tray are appearing over there, many other seedlings are appearing everywhere it is spring, the weather is beautiful, it's gardening season, it's gardening season oh, look at my chard. I love showing this. Look at it, isn't it a pretty rainbow? Light chard. Well, anyway, that's all I have for today. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. Have a great day. as always see you in the next video