Me picking leaves for the sallad.
The tomatoes drink more than two bottles of water each day. I refill the bottles, but I don't like the sound of roots breaking when I press them back into the soil. To solve the problem I cut off their bottoms to be able to fill them while they were still in the pot.
That was not a good idea. The water ran straight through bottle and soil in no time. I should have realised that it needed some sort of suspension to make the system work, but I've seen tomatoes watered this way outdoors. Outdoor tomatoes, on the other hand, have an endless buffert of soil beneath them. Duh!
This strikes me as a good exemple of mistakes you have to do in order to become a good gardener. The skill improves greatly by those few occasions when you do everything backwards. So, after wiping the water off the floor and replacing the bottles, both I and the tomatoes are happy.
3 comments:
Such a big bottle for a small pot :)
I can see why you cringe when sticking the bottle into the pot. Getting it deep enough to stay without breaking roots looks impossible.
Maybe setting a piece of pipe into the pot large enough to hold the bottle might work. It won't take up any more space than the bottle jammed into the soil. Just be sure there is enough soil in the pipe to cover the opening in the bottle.
Learning from your mistakes - then I must be the smartest man alive.
Interesting to see how systems develop, by trial and error.
Is there any way you can have a kind of funnel poked in the soil, to which you can attach the bottle? Then you could pull the bottle off the funnel, without disturbing the roots, refill the bottle & invert it back over the funnel. Hope that makes sense! Intriguing!
TopVeg
Wiseacre & TopVeg: God ideas! There should be some stuff somewhere that I could use. I tend to live my life according to the motto "Better living through wreckless experimentation"... :)
Post a Comment