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House Plant Irrigation

Aqua sobriquet

Aqua sobriquet

Member
Joined
17 Mar 2012
Messages
2,403
Location
Dorset
I’ve forgotten to water a couple of my plants recently and one of them didn’t recover from drying out. One of them in particular gets through a lot of water. I have been contemplating using either a wicking system or possibly a drip feed. Anyone else use anything other than standing the pot in a tray of water? I’ve built up a nice collection of outer pots that I want to continue using.

IMG-5561.jpg
Ideally I’d like something that’s easy to see when the water supply is getting low. I’ve ordered a couple of glass containers to trial a wicking setup but I’m open to other ideas.
 
I have a few of the Lechuza range (Amazon), and they are great pots and have an easy display to read when the water is running low. It does take some time for the roots to get to the bottom, so beware of that for the first couple of months!
 
There's the capillary mats ,great for grouping different plants together and very useful if you away for a while in Summer
 
I purchased one of these for my balcony and works pretty well, I did run it on a window with 10 pots for a while also! I had to purchase little taps to control how much water went into each vase as they were all of different sizes/requirements, took a little tinkering but once it's done all you need to do is refill the container 😉

Amazon product ASIN B08LK7VH9P
 
This is an old-school trick I heard my old grandma telling me about while she was knitting me a pullover when I still was a little kid.

Wool Yarn and a jar of water.
 
What I do have a positive experience with is 2 pots in 1 and filling the bigger decorative pot with hydro clay pebbles and the smaller plastic pot with soil and plant in the pebbles. The first pot is large enough to leave enough room below the pot in it. It actually doesn't matter how much room is in there if size doesn't matter and it would be enough for 5 litres you don't have to water the plant for an entire year.

I have a large palm sp. standing like this already for 20 years and it's still ok. Once a year I drop 5 litres of water into it. All this water seeps to the bottom.
The porous clay pebbles soak it up and the plant roots search their way down into it. About 5 years ago I replaced the soil from the smaller pot to replace it with fresh soil again to feed the plant. I never used any fertilizer, the plant seems to have sufficient of it from what's in the tap water and the soil. But my tap water has 40ppm N for free... The soil in the inner pot only gets a little damp from its natural capillary suction.

Most people use only clay pebbles, but then you need special fertilizer. But organic soil requires as all houseplants do once every few years some new soil. You can scoop this out from the top with a spoon and replace it.

This is in practice not different from the hydroculture principle, there is no law that says you can't use both methods to your advantage. 🙂 The bigger the pot to more water it can hold the longer the plant takes to use it all up.

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hypnogogia said:
That’s not much water at all for an entire year.
Click to expand...

I guess in a small pot a lot will evaporate from the soil and dries out quicker. But when it's all the way down at the bottom covered with a large volume of clay pebbles there will be 0 evaporation. And some Palm Sp. probably aren't that thirsty.
 
I use one of those probes that I just poke the soil with. It is better than I thought it would be for £8.

Checking once per week with a jug of aquarium water in one hand and the probe in the other. It's now become a part of weekly water change, so I don't forget to check the plants 😀

Matt

probe
 
palcente said:
I use one of those probes that I just poke the soil with. It is better than I thought it would be for £8.

Checking once per week with a jug of aquarium water in one hand and the probe in the other. It's now become a part of weekly water change, so I don't forget to check the plants 😀

Matt

probe
Click to expand...
I have one of these also, it's pretty good 🙂
 
Update. This seems to be working much better. Hard to be exact at the moment but it seems to have transferred about 2ml of water in about 12 hours which is much better. I can obviously increase the rate buy adding more strings.
 
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