Written by Do you often forget to water your plants? Or do you wish to go on a vacation without having to bother about watering your plants? Then these innovative and cool self watering flower pots are just the thing for you. These intelligent planters do not need manual watering daily, you just need to water your plants once and then these self watering plant pots will take care of the rest, say for a week or even two. Your plants will be just as fresh, when you return from work or from a week long vacation.
Photo Credits: One wintry night pottery
Let us check out how these intelligent containers work. Self watering planters have a container that is filled with water. This is the water reservoir from which the soil draws water every time it dries up, by the basic principle of Osmosis. This also ensures that plants get just the right amount of water and not a lot of it. You can add a dilute solution of fertilizer to the water in the reservoir to achieve optimum results. These innovative planters save prevent wastage of water by way of evaporation and excessive watering. You can make eco-friendly, self-watering planters from recyclable materials instead of going for the more expensive ready-made ones.
Photo Credits: Sugar Pond
Photo Credits: canarsiebk
Points to note
1. This works wonders for many herbs, climbers and flowering plants. But some plants need drier soil conditions and cannot be planted in self watering plant pots. You have to ascertain this before planting.
2. Mosquitoes may grow in the water reservoir. You can prevent this by adding some drops of light weight vegetable oil to the water. The oil will float and suffocate the mosquito larvae.
How to build self watering planters
Here is a very informative and useful video by BalconyGrow that precisely tells you how to build your very own self watering plant pot.
Now these self watering planters need not be all drab and ugly. You can add a dash of creativity by spray painting the outer container with some nice Krylon paint or arranging containers of different shapes and sizes on beautiful planter stands.
Photo Credits: Haldane Martin
You can user beautiful pots made of terracotta, stone and ceramic for making these planters. Large patio planters can be made from large buckets and barrels. By proper arrangement of these self watering planters, you can add a beautiful design to the landscape of your garden.
If you are not the ‘DIY’ types, you can even shop online for some beautiful self watering plant containers that embellish your garden. Overall, a self watering container can be an interesting add-on to your indoor as well as outdoor garden in addition to being a boon to your plants.
