How to make a Self Watering Planter

Hey, this was Hale with easy living yards and today I want to show you how to

make

a

self

-

watering

planter

. These are amazing ways to reduce maintenance in your garden or landscape, both from a functional and decorative standpoint, so you can I can see here. I have two

self

-

watering

planter

s that I made. Growing rosemary right now and basically how they work. They have a water reservoir at the bottom and then at the top you have the potting soil in your plant of course. and you have this pipe that goes down to fill the tank to the bottom.

Now there are a couple of very important tricks that I will explain later to show you how these things work because you can't just have a pot with water in the bottom. it will kill your plant of course you can

make

them with something really cheap really cheap these things are super fast so we can build them so here's one made with a five gallon bucket and some spare parts I had lying around, this is kind of The best I've ever made, it's still very economical, it's a composite container. The key here is that if you make a better one like this you want to make sure it's a single wall container, something you can drill holes in, that's really important and of course the bottom needs to be sealed too so there can't be any. a drainage hole in the bottom so if you find one of these containers you can make them look really beautiful and plant something really pretty in them to put on your front porch or on your patio and of course these guys are not so pretty but they are incredibly functional, they work great, they save you tons of work if you are trying to grow a container garden or you know you don't care as much If you have something nicer, but want to have some beautiful plants in your landscape, these work very okay, so I'll show you how to make them.

We're jumping in here real quick so we can show you how it really works. You can understand what's going on and then if you end up making any modifications, you can do it in a way that still works well. Basically what we have here is our cube and you can see this little thing on the side. here, that's an overflow hole, we're going to put an overflow hole in there and that's very important so that your bucket doesn't basically fill to the top as you fill it and end up drowning in the roots of your plants, you want to make sure that They have moisture but don't get waterlogged because the roots actually also need air and oxygen to function properly, so that's the really key factor here and why self-watering pots are so useful because they allow air to pass through. space in the soil mix, as well as good moisture, and that's very important, so let's see how this thing is going to be built, so we have our bucket, that little overflow hole, we're going to have a couple of spacers in there.

I'm using some leftover containers of sour cream, whatever you use here, you just want to make sure there's some kind of structure to stand up on and hold the next piece that I'm going to show you and this will help you determine your water level in your reservoir. , so you want a couple of inches of height there, but you don't want to overdo it, you just want enough to be able to hold a good reservoir of water at the bottom of your pot and of course these need to be permeable. Well, so you can fill the inside with water and you'll show it while I build this thing.

Okay, once we have our spacers there, the next piece is a contraption that I'm going to call a spacer. So what is this? This is a plastic disc that sits flat right on top of those spacers. You can see how they sit there and then there's this tube, it's our fill tube that fills the water in the reservoir. The really key piece here. You can see this is an angled cut on the bottom which is also very important so that it doesn't sit flat on the bottom, you don't actually fill the container so you have to sit at an angle so as you fill it with water , water can get into this space underneath Another key feature here you can also see now, these spacers are placed a little bit higher than the overflow hole, so this spacer piece, this flat plastic piece that's in the video , it is made with the lid of our bucket, it is a little higher. it provides an air space, so let me put the water in now so you can see where the water is.

It overflows right into that hole of water, right into that hole that we have drilled in the bucket. You have an air space that allows for what is called root pruning. or air prune the roots so that as the roots grow in this bucket, if they pass the absorbent membrane that I have not placed here yet, if they pass they will stop growing in this air space because the air or the plants will not No I like to grow where there is air basically with its roots for the most part, of course, any plant we are going to put in here, so this water will not reach the roots and cause root rot and disease problems. that kind of thing, so we have water, we have our spacers to hold the separator piece, we have our fill tube, the next thing we have is an absorbent membrane, so I'm using a simple one. old t-shirt in the video and here, so it's this gray material now that I put here, you can see that part of it goes down into the water, so we basically pull, let me go back a little bit to our separator that Put it there, you can see that there is a hole just in the middle.

We also took out the water so it's easier to see and I'm going to remove those spacers as well, so what we have is our bucket with our separator. The piece is fine, it's floating in the air right now, but it will be on top of those spacers. It has a hole in the center that will allow our whipping material to be drawn into the water layer and then it has a hole to fit into. pipe that is used to fill the reservoir okay you can see it pretty easily okay so let's put the water back in let's put the spacers back in so this shows the completed construction every once in a while we're going to put it back in .

Absorbent membrane, okay, so the absorbent membrane, as you can see, goes around the edges of the pot and it's going to go a little bit below the edge of the separator; It will bend around the edges if we can do it. Sometimes it's a tight fit, but you want it to be as tight as possible, this stops soil from seeping into the water tank and clogging things up and it keeps the nutrition in the space that the plants can access and so it's really important. that you get a piece to go down in that tank that you know as much as you can so that it can absorb the water up to the upper membrane.

It's very important that this absorbent material is made of cotton or some type of natural fiber, so just a regular cotton t-shirt works great, just an old t-shirt that you don't wear anymore works better than plastic, you know, polyester or something that will absorb the material so the last thing of course is going to be our soil mix and and the important thing here is to use a potting soil mix that allows for adequate absorption action through the soil profile so what we're going to do What to have now is this water reservoir, we have an air space and then a thing that separates the water or potting soil from the water area so it doesn't get soaked in the water and also separates the roots so they can't grow into it. down, then we have our absorbent material that collects the water up and as it absorbs into the rest of the shirt, it will actually go into the potting soil, it will use capillary action to push the water up through the soil profile to So you can check it quickly, just play with sticking your finger in the top of the soil a couple of inches down to see if it's still wet enough, so that's basically it for how this thing is built, okay, let's jump into the materials we really need here, let me get this video out of the way, here we go, okay, so what are we going to do?

We will need materials, we already talked about this, but the most important thing is a bucket or a single wall pot that you buy if you are not going for looks, five gallon buckets work great, try to get one with a lid and it makes life too. much easier or you need a piece of plastic that you can cut into a circle that fits in the bottom of your container or planter. Well, you need a piece of PVC pipe. I chose a piece of 1 inch pipe here. Whatever the outside diameter or that pipe, you need a bit that fits as well.

You need an old t-shirt that will be used as absorbent material. You need some old containers. It may be old. Planting cups. Yogurt cups. Sour cream containers like the ones I used. here something like that of course you need a plant and the things that I forgot to show here are that you need some soil mix and some water of course okay the tools you will need are your side hole drill bits and then the holes. in small containers to make sure they don't have a giant air bubble, you need a quarter inch drill bit. I went with a 5/16 inch here, whatever you have lying around, that's about the size of your pinky finger. job you don't want too big just because then you'll have bugs inside your container, you don't want too little because then your water won't be able to properly fill your cups, your separator or your spacer cups in there and then also your overflow hole. you need to be able to drain quickly and easily, and then you need an inch and a quarter drill bit or whatever size is the outside diameter of the pipe you are using to fill and it will also be the same drill bit. which is used to punch the center hole to pull the absorbent material into the water tank.

He also had a rasp. This one didn't actually have a rasp lying around, so I use the metal file very gently, but you want to scrape for something like that. clean up the plastic burrs that end up going everywhere, you don't really need this but it's nice to have something to cut the pipe so one side of the pipe will have a 90 degree cut and the other will be a 90 degree cut angle as we talked about, you need a jigsaw or some type of saw that can cut your circular spacer that goes down into your pot and of course you need your safety materials, your gloves and safety glasses, you need a marker.

I have a mark the crane here that didn't work in the picture so you need a Sharpie marker or something and of course a drill to use your drill bits okay guys let's jump into building this thing now okay so just I am going to jump. Now let's move on to a quick preview of the build, so let's get started right, so the first thing I'm going to do is take those spacer cups that are going to determine the height of our tank and I'm going to mark them about an inch below them. that will be our overflow hole for the water tank so you don't overfill it, of course don't forget your safety gear.

Now I'm using a 5/16 inch drill bit to make the hole you just want. something about the pinky size doesn't have to be 5/16, that's the size I chose, so again I check that height to make sure the cuffs sit higher than that hole, that's really important, you can use it here. Using some old sour cream glasses, you can also see them on the side. I have some planter glasses, as well as some old yogurt glasses, whatever you have lying around, just make sure it has some holes so the water can seep through. the inside of those cups as well so that they can be part of the water tank and they don't want to float or whatever, cleaning up some of the plastic fragments that are in there and showing you how they will sit inside the bucket, okay, let's get them out now, let's go To prepare the lid, that lid will become the separator, so first we will cut the center piece of that lid.

I'm going to drill two holes, one in the center for the absorbent membrane which will be a t-shirt and then a hole on the side for our fill tube, so that's that fill tube. I have a pre-made or pre-cut piece with that cube on the bottom so you can Look, okay, so there are those two holes, now we also need to cut that insert piece for the spacer that will go on top of our little cup spacers and to To do that, I'll take a jigsaw or whatever type of saw you have. You don't have to use a jigsaw, pre-drill a little hole that I forgot to make there, as you can see, and you want to cut just a little bit on the inside.

That edge doesn't have to be perfect, but you want it to be. a little bit inside the rim so this piece fits inside the bucket with just a little wiggle room to spare, try not to cut into the tube filler hole, it's also there where I just went through and now I'm going to grab the rasp and just clean up the birds and stuff a little bit, just so you know, just to clean up the work so you don't have bits of plastic flying everywhere inside your system, it's nice to have that stuff. get out of there, okay, so the RIM once we're done, we can also put it on top of the hub just to add some rigidity.

Now you can see that this is just a piece of PVC thatI had there. I think it's PVC conduit and they can use it, I have some PVC cutters, you don't have to get fancy here, although just know that you can see this pool saw that I have on the right here as well and it works well, just something to cut your pipe and I think it has a one inch conduit, so you'll end up having about an inch and a quarter on the outside diameter, whatever the outside diameter of your pipe is, just make sure you cut the hole appropriately.

Now I'm just showing you what the internal mechanisms are. It will look like we saw a good view of that in our little demo earlier as well. Now I'm passing the absorbent material. It's just a cotton t-shirt. Make sure it has a good amount of cotton or, ideally, that it is 100% cotton. you want to make sure all the edges of this and the shirts still overlap around the sides of your separator and you want to pull that piece down a couple of inches at least so it goes as far into the water as possible and here I'm cutting a small hole through the jacket where the water fill tube will go through and angled the cut down and your jacket will fit on top of the absorbent material so you have a small piece going down into the reservoir. water from your absorbent material, the rest sits on top to help absorb the water into your planting mix, so now I put all the cups in you, place the separator with the absorbent material tee and its fill tube and now you're basically ready, so I'm going to fill it with some potting mix.

What I am using here is an organic mechanics container potting mix. It's a wonderful mix. I really like the organic mechanics. I'm not sponsored by them, maybe I should be, but yes, they do. Some good things, if you want to make your own, you can make a good sustainable mix using one third compost, one third coconut fiber and one third rice hulls. You'll do quite well and here again I'm trimming it just to add a little bit. rigidity to the bucket and then I'm going to put my plant in, so the plant that I'm planting here is just some pre-started organic spinach.

I got both the planting mix and the spinach from Whole Foods, they have a good supply each year of plants and soil mixes too which are good sustainable mixes, organic plants if you want, if you're eating greens and stuff you know you want to eat things organic and of course you want to water them so I'm using some of my rainwater that we collect in our garden is great you can use a hose or whatever. I gently water the top because you want the potting mix to get wet and moist or else it doesn't work very well and then of course filling I put that reservoir up through the tube and that's what the tubes are for keep an eye on that bucket just down to the right of that warning label that you can see on the bucket, there you see, I emptied this hole, this hole filled the pot and I'm adding more, so keep an eye out and watch when it starts to overflow.

You know your tank is full and you can use a funnel. It's generally a good idea. There you have it, you can also use a hose so you can watch it overflow. that means our warehouse is full and we're basically done, that's it guys okay don't forget to clean up your plastic mess. You know we now have a major problem with plastics entering our waterways and our oceans, it seems pretty far away. away, but plastic floats very well, it gets into animals and all kinds of creatures and causes a lot of problems, you can see. I love automatic watering planners, they are amazing, they are easy to make, be sure to build some yourselves that is.

More or less on how to create a self-watering planter. I'm so excited to share this with you because it's a huge time saver and helps save plants. Look, no one is cursed with this. You know, I just don't have any luck with plants or whatever. No one has been blessed with just this innate ability to take care of plants, it takes work, it takes time, it takes failure to get there, but self-watering pots are a great way to do it all, so if you have no idea how to plant one plant, then it will not die.

I created an amazing resource just for you. It is called how to plant the plant so that it does not die. This is a free resource. Go ahead and check the link right there and you will be able to see it. It's an incredible resource. It explains the basics of what to do and what not to do for caring for virtually any plant you want to plant, so check it out. I am always available for questions. All you have to do is go to the easy living gardens. calm down, bar, ask and go ahead and ask me a question.

I will contact you. I would love to help you with your landscape problems. Let us all work to make this world a more beautiful place, a more beautiful habitat for the world around us. Let us, the creatures living around us, go out and make a positive difference. Alright guys, thanks for tuning in. Make sure you live with passion and make tomorrow better than today.