Watering while on holiday.

[shiney]

Who has some ideas for watering plants and valuable veggie plants when you go away.

Apart from roping in a neighbour?

[FluffyMuppet]

Hi Shiney,

I was in this situation last August. Our neighbours are an elderly couple and I didn't feel I could rope them in.

So my most valuable plants (two new blueberry bushes and my dwarf nectarine), which grow in pots on the patio, I protected with plantpals. These are plastic bottles with a wick (of capillary matting) which only gives out water when the plant wants it, so they can't overwater.

I had various systems using capillary matting and a reservoir for the indoor plants. You can set somethng up easily with a bit of capillary matting (for the plants to sit on) which extends into a sink of water or the bath. You can also get self-watering trays which do the whole job for you.

Other than that, I 'plunged' as many of the outdoor small pots as I could into a larger one, so that they had longer reserves of water and cooler roots. In fact, most of them have stayed there all winter and I'm just now moving them to plant my beans in the big tubs.

As far as I can remember, everything survived just fine, but it may have rained a lot while I was away... 8)

The advice for things planted in the soil is to give them as thorough a soaking as you can manage the night before you go, and then mulch on top of that to stop the water evaporating.

[hedgewizard]

I wanna revive this thread for a minute, 'cos I just bought a piece of capillary matting to put on some plastic sheeting on a level shelf. I read in Bernard Salt's "Gardening Under Plastic" that you can get a microporous membrane to put on top of the capillary matting so roots can't grow into it. Anyone know where you can get the membrane?

[Wombat]

I've done the capillary thing using coarse sand - have a look in the potting soil article!

Nev

[Muddypause]

I read in Bernard Salt's "Gardening Under Plastic" that you can get a microporous membrane to put on top of the capillary matting so roots can't grow into it. Anyone know where you can get the membrane?

I wonder how micro the pores need to be. I'm wondering if horticultural fleece would do the job.

[hedgewizard]

Thanks Wombat for the pointer, that would work well provided you could water the thing periodically. I wonder if you could bridge the gap between your sand trays and a water reservoir with a wick of capillary matting?

I found the membrane at last after tripping over Bernard Salt's book this afternoon (literally). £1.25/m this year; http://www.simplycontrol.com/catalogue/ ... efault.asp

Shiney, if you're really serious about watering stufftake a look here. Basic irrigation doesn't have to be expensive, and if you can run a lot of things off a timer your neighbours won't have to do much while you're away.