Self Watering Containers

A plethora of productive self watering containers.

As I pointed out in my first post, I had some significant challenges to overcome before growing any food this season.  The most obvious one was the fact that I didn't have any available garden or soil to actually do the growing in.  While the backyard of the house we're renting is of adequate size, I would hazard a guess that tearing sod out would've had us unwillingly looking for another home before I got a seed in the ground.

I had some preconceived notions about containers from years of seeing nothing growing in them except annual or perennial flowers and perhaps a few dwarf variety trees.  But as I read more about gardening, I found that many people had actually successfully harvested fruits and vegetables from container bound plants.  I also learned of something called a self watering (or sub irrigated) container - I'll refer to them as SWCs from herein.  In short, these were containers that featured a reservoir of water that would constantly keep the growing medium (soil) moist.  This concept was intriguing to me as there was obviously potential there to do away with some of the regular watering maintenance required for gardens or traditional containers.  That was big for me - as I mentioned previously time is a precious commodity for me during the warmer months.

An aching to be picked carrot in an SWC.

In addition to the potential for minimizing maintenance keeping your growing medium at a uniform 'perfect' level of moistness at all times is a big advantage to most plants (you wouldn't want this with a select few herbs or cacti but just about everything else loves it).  Traditional containers could get tricky to water; its much too easy to over or under water them leaving your plants either drowning or dieing of thirst depending on the day.  Having an SWC with a large reservoir keeps soil moistness right where you want it without your intervention for potentially long periods of time.  More advantages of container gardening in general:

   - having the ability to position your plants to get an optimum amount of sun.
   - having your growing medium heat up and be ready to germinate various seeds weeks before a ground garden would.
   - very little worry about weeds, these relentless little things can turn the most enthusiastic gardener into a pile of mush and ruin a harvest in a few short weeks.

The kale and chard were seeded in this SWC only two weeks ago for a fall harvest.

So I set out looking for SWCs here in Edmonton and quickly found that getting my hands on these things wouldn't be easy.  What I mostly found was small, round SWCs with tiny reservoirs.  I did buy a couple of these things which, for various reasons (size of reservoir being a key one), I'll be retiring at the end of this season.  But I wanted something large with a good size reservoir and the potential to grow some huge indeterminate tomato plants.  I found a product called 'Earthbox'.  The Earthbox is indeed a very well designed SWC that came pretty much ready to use and had a long line of success stories behind it.   The only problem with them was cost - roughly $90 each.  They are, in fact, significantly cheaper in the US where they're made but by the time these hefty containers are shipped up here and resold for a profit, they can flatten a wallet in no time.  I went ahead and purchased two of them in any case - they were too cool to pass up.

A homemade SWC modelled after the 'Earthtainer'.

Still, I wanted to have more than two containers worth of garden so I needed another alternative.  While investigating SWCs online, I also found numerous methods other had used to build their own.  With just a little bit of work, one could cut the cost of a good SWC substaintlly and come out with a homemade product that functioned just as well the Earthbox.  People had put together very effective SWCs out of two plain old 5 gallon pails available at any hardware store.  They'd also made some very sizable and impressive SWCs out of storage totes - one that particularly caught my eye was a set of plans that a generous individual had put up to construct something he called an Earthtainer.  After having a look at them, I decided this way the way to go and went about constructing my own SWCs - many of the modelled after the Earthtainer.

So what makes up an SWC?  It's actually all very simple.  A SWC is simply a container that has three important features.  1) A place for growing medium (soil).  2) A place to store water (reservoir).  3) A means of providing that water some way of staying in contact with -some- of the growing medium.  With the third point taken care of, the water in the reservoir would move through the growing medium via capillary action.  Soak the corner of a tissue in a glass of water and you'll notice that the tissue begins getting wet above the water's surface.  The same sort of thing happens in these containers - as long as a portion of the growing medium is in contact with the water in the reservoir, the medium will 'wick' that water in and keep itself nicely moist.

As you can see in the above photo, the way this is accomplished is with something called a 'wicking basket'.  The basket is essentially a piece of plastic with holes along its structure.  When filled with tamped down growing medium, the basket is secured to the soil bench and immersed in the reservoir and the water within is allowed to stay in permanent contact with it.  As long as their is water in the reservoir, the growing medium held in the container will remain moist and a happy plant will result.  In this case, the reservoir is filled via the piece of PVC pipe you see stuck into the soil bench.  The little holes you see in the soil bench serve two purposes.  The first is drainage - as these container sit outside a significant rainfall can easily waterlog the growing medium which makes plants very unhappy (and can ultimately kill them).  The second is to provide air to the bottom of your growing medium.  Who knew that roots needed air?  Ok - maybe you did - but I really didn't and, as it turns out, having air within the growing medium is just a crucial to a plants health as food (fertilizer) and water.  Not pictured here but also very important are drainage holes on the sides of the container near the top level of the reservoir.  These ensure that the reservoir is never overfilled which could potentially be disasterous to the plants within (plants never like wet feet - moist is where its at).

A double tote SWC with two small wicking baskets.

So my trusty powerdrill and I went to work and created a plethora of self watering containers of different sizes and design tweaks.  Though it did take a little time it wasn't terribly difficult and I now command an army of these handy little food creators.

Getting them started is very easy.  Fill them with your favorite moistened potting mix (NEVER garden soil - I'll talk more about this in a future post), fill the reservoir, sow your seeds or transplant your seedlings, then profit.  Well it might not be quite that easy - but it's not alot harder than that.  For a good chunk of my garden, the maintenance required is simply topping up the reservoir with water (and sometimes some water soluable fertilizer) every few days to a week.

That isn't the case with everything though.  I learned one very important lesson when it comes to SWCs early on.  That is make the reservoir as big as you possibly can.  The monstrous tomato plant pictured in the previous post resides in a 12 gallon SWC that has a 1.5 gallon (5 litre) reservoir.  1.5 gallons you say - that sounds like alot.  Ha!  No, actually it isn't.  When tomatos and other large plants like squash/zucchini get to be full sized, 1.5 gallons lasts ............ 24 hours.  That's it that's all.  When I first planted the seedling into the container, I had no idea what was coming.  As much as I love how well this tomato has flourished in its home, on any given day without significant rain I need to fill the reservoir as it goes bone dry in one day (precisely the maintenance I wanted to avoid by using SWCs in the first place).

These leeks growing in two small double-tote SWCs will make some mighty fine soup.  Plants like leeks don't use vast amounts of water but they must be kept moist.  When it comes to larger fruiting plants like tomatoes or squash though, look out!  The amount of water stored in these reservoirs would likely not keep even a medium sized tomato plant watered for a single day.

Of course earlier on in the season I had no idea.  When I first planted the seedling, I needed only top the reservoir up weekly to get it happy.  A month later as the plant had doubled in size, I noticed the soil on the surface would start looking dried out after 3 or 4 days and had to fill more frequently.  About three weeks ago, after filling the reservoir full on a Monday morning, I happened to go outside to check on something on Tuesday afternoon.  The bottom leaves on the tomato had started to wilt!  A few quick finger checks and I determined that the medium had gone completely dry.  Yikes!  No worries though - I caught it soon enough that an hour after I watered the plant perked right back up again.  That said though, any largish container I build now (mostly in the 30 gallon range) features a reservoir no smaller than 6 gallons - sometimes more.

Other that that its been reasonable smooth sailing.  With a few blips unrelated to SWCs themselves, the plants in every SWC I've started have been producing exceptionally well or are at least getting close to harvest.  Haven't had any plant deaths and, as expected, weeding can be accomplished in about 5 minutes once every two weeks.

Want salad?  These SWCs contain all the ingrediants you'll need.

I've become an SWC believer - they truly are very effective devices.  There is no reason that anyone couldn't grow some of their own food by throwing one of these things down in the backyard, on the driveway, or even an apartment balcony.

Good growing!

Alberta Gardening

A fresh Lincoln pea pod still a few days from being ready to harvest.

Welcome to the Alberta Gardening blog.  I started this blog as a means of sharing my first real experiences with growing vegetables and a few fruits in Edmonton, Alberta during the growing season of 2010 so that anyone that might have an interest in growing some of their own food can hopefully get off to a running start while avoiding some of the silly mistakes I made along the way. 

Just a year or so ago - like many people in the new millenium - my knowledge of the production of fruits and vegetables was limited to the belief that a farmer somewhere threw some seeds in dirt and, soon after, they magically appeared in the produce section of a local supermarket.  My only exposure to gardening was the very small garden patch my parents maintained when I was younger and the much larger garden my late grandmother tended.  That was some time ago, however, and the only thing I really remember about those gardens was relentlessly raiding the pea and strawberry patches.

Bush beans and carrots sharing an Earthbox

Last fall, I started taking a stronger interest in gardening for a few reasons.  First off, my wife and I intend on living on an acreage in the near future and no acreage would possibly be complete without a garden.  Secondly, it seems everytime I head to the supermarket the prices of fruits and vegetables have gone up again.  And lastly, a good portion of the produce that I can buy (notwithstanding what comes from decent growers at farmer's markets) tastes like a bundle of wet cardboard by the time it hits the store shelves.  I remember what the peas and strawberries tasted like fresh from my grandmother's garden and the stuff at the supermarket doesn't compare - not even close.

Sweet 100 tomatos getting close to full size

Beyond that, fruit and vegetable gardening has, over time, become something of a lost skill.  And I find that unfortunate as I firmly believe its a skill worth having - whether you have a huge garden or a plant or two.  A quick drive around Edmonton shows that gardening skills for most is limited to the care of a few hardy annual or perennial flowers to add some colour to the front yard.  Pretty - no doubt - but little value beyond those aesthetics.  Having all the produce you can shake a stick at available at your nearest grocery or department store at reasonably affordable prices for so many years combined with the time constraints of modern life has put the kaibosh on the old school veggie garden.  It's certainly understandable yet theirs something to be said for the satisfaction of growing your own healthy food that tastes better and costs less than the stuff at the supermarket.

With all that in mind, I started reading about gardening with every spare moment as the snow began to fall in 2009.  Various books and the internet proved to be full of information - not all of it consistent .. some of it downright contradictory.  But I did ingest alot and, by about February, 2010, was chomping at the bit to grow something.  I did have some challenges to overcome, however.

1) We're currently renting a house.  This backyard of which has no exposed soil and I'd venture a guess that the property owner's wouldn't appreciate me going ballistic on the lawn with a shovel.

2) I'm a career wedding and portrait photographer.  For me, summers are ultra busy.  Sometimes 80 hours a week busy.  Add a wife and two year old daughter into the mix and my down time averages about 7 seconds per day.

3) We live in Edmonton - zone 3 in garden speak.  That means that our growing season - the time between spring and fall frosts - is approximately 12 minutes long.  And thats during a warm year.

Romaine lettuce ready for the salad bowl.

It's now early August of 2010 and so far this summer, we've harvested oodles of peas, about 20 zucchinis, a bunch of carrots, lettuce, chard, potatos, and one tomato (more incoming soon).  Our bean patch has exploded with blooms and small pods, the tomato plants are filled with ripening tomatos, a new pea patch has recently been sowed, a handful of cucumbers are growing slowly and streadily, and the fall looks to be full of a constant supply of lettuce, carrots, chard, kale, and spinach.  All of this with - for the most part - no more than a few minutes a day of tending.

I'm definately not bragging as I've run into numerous problems that I'll chalk up as good learning experiences.  But overall, I'm pretty happy - especially when I see my little girl munching on a carrot fresh out of the soil with the top still attached.  Oh yeah... and I'm back to thinking that peas are more than smushy, tasteless filler in chicken fried rice too.  They actually taste like little sugar candies when you pick them at just the right time.

Fresh Lincoln Peas along with a Black Beauty and Gold Rush Zucchini from the garden 2 weeks ago

If I owe this summer's modest growing successes to anything, it's the discovery of self watering (or sometimes called sub irrigated) containers.  Beyond being time savers where watering is concerned, they take much of the guess work out of gardening.  Building and using them has been a great experience and made me a believer in their potential to grow food darn near anywhere and often better than can be done in the classic in-ground garden.

Working toward a guest appearance on the Little Shop of Horrors sequel, this Sweet 100 tomato plant is now 6 feet tall.

With that said, self watering containers will be the topic of my next post which will be up within a week.

Goodbye for now and good growing!