Tips For Watering Problems When Container Vegetable Gardening

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010 at 11:41 am

bottle-drip-irrigation When it comes to watering my garden I have found there is a big difference in our in-ground vegetable garden compared to our container vegetable garden.

It seems like I had to water the container garden every day and sometimes more than once a day. Which makes it tough when I am not home every day to water them. Something had to be done that would help our containers hold water longer without drowning our plants.

We started a container vegetable garden a couple of years before digging up the backyard for our new in-ground vegetable garden. I know I had to water them a lot but didn’t think too much about it until this past summer when we started our first vegetable garden in-ground. We continued growing veggies in containers and that’s when we realized the watering issue.

How We Use Recycling To Fix Our Container Garden Watering Problem

Because I had already planted a number of vegetables in containers and had them well established I didn’t want to take them out of the containers so we looked for a fix without starting over. That meant looking for ways to keep water available without the need to be home throughout the day.

Keep Those Plastic Pop Bottles

I checked online using Google to find how to use a plastic bottle for drip irrigation, but they didn’t seem to work the way they said it would. So I thought about the problem and made a simple change that seems to work for me.

Step 1 – Get yourself a plastic pop bottle that still has the cap intact.

The size of the bottle is going to determine how much water you can keep in reserve for your plant. I started with a 600ml bottle.

Step 2 – Drill a small hole in the cap but not so small that it will just plug up with dirt. You can experiment with one small hole to start with and then add more holes in the cap if you want a faster drip. Don’t make the holes so big that water and air can be exchanged to quickly as your water will run instead of drip.

Step 3 – Fill the bottle with water, put the cap back on and bury it in the soil deep enough so that the bottle won’t topple over and shallow enough to water the soil in the container and not just run out the bottom.

It’s just that simple and it works.

Note: Of course you can use this method to water areas of your yard that may get too much sun that dries the soil too much. I do tend to use mulch in these areas to help retain moisture and keep the ground from heating up too much.