DIY Self Watering Container / Planter Box - 💦🪴🌺🌸💦

welcome to harmony hills home and garden i'm jenny and we're gardening here in baltimore maryland zone 7. today i'm going to be showing you how i put together a self-watering container it's a raised bed container in my side yard and this is something it's a diy project using materials that you can get at the home center so come along with me and let's see how it's done the pieces of this video were filmed on different days because the project was done over the course of about a week and a half so that's why you see me wearing different clothes and stuff but anyway so we have this big box in the side of our yard that we had it all along intended to be a raised garden container um and we've had it here for a few years actually i think this will be his third anniversary of it being in this yard and we just haven't ever gotten it planted so this season is the season it's happening and uh but with this a container of this size i wanted to be sure to have some sort of self-watering mechanism inside of it so i did a lot of research online both blogs and youtube videos and other websites and i came up with what i think is going to work really well for us here and i bet you could do this too so let me show you the different steps involved what i'm going to be doing is lining the wooden box with some pond liner and that is going to make the box watertight that's very important the box has to be watertight and then we'll be using a french drain pipe in the bottom of the container to serve as the uh water reservoir and air reservoir underneath the soil so let me just get to it and and get this project going the tools that i need i think it's just a stapler and some staples and uh my pond liner and at the end i'll probably cut it up uh cut the edge with some scissors um the pond liner that i bought is seven feet by ten feet and that's perfect for this size container because it's six feet long it's two feet wide and about 18 inches deep and so this is the size of pond liner that will perfectly fit this and make it watertight and i'll have a little bit left over to trim off at the end [Music] inside the box i was sure to make room for soil to completely cover the bottom so what i mean by that is that i tucked the liner all the way back into all the corners with plenty of room to spare so that it wouldn't create this like curved corner there and then the other thing i did was i did a nice hospital corner to tuck in the corners over here i didn't cut them i tried not to make many holes in it although for each corner i did put one staple down in the bottom but i think that one staple is going to be fine so again nice hospital corners and um it's just stapled up underneath the edge all along the sides i don't know if you can see the staples in there or not okay now i'm just gonna trim off this extra i plan to just tuck this down inside the soil so that's why i'm leaving this little extra flap that way i don't have to worry about seeing the raw edges that'll be under the soil line [Music] so this will just get tucked down and the soil will come up to about there the next piece of this project is to put in a reservoir for water in the bottom of the container where water can stay and gradually seep into the soil and so the method i'm going to use there are money methods you could choose but the one i'm going to use is to use french drain corrugated corrugated pipe that's got perforations in it this particular one happens to have a nylon sleeve over top of it and that will help prevent soil from seeping into the pipes but honestly that's not really necessary in this application but i am going to go ahead and use it because the reason i bought this one is because it's super flexible you can make u-turns very tightly just like that so this is 25 feet long which should allow me to do four runs up and down and up and down all along the bottom of this container i think this costs about 28 for 25 feet of it if my memory is serving me well all right now this has to be pulled apart to be its full length and you can maybe see the little perforations in there it's very much like an ex bendy straw and i'll tell you what this is a pain in the booty he keeps pulling us off a ledge into deep water what'd you do today jenny fought with a corrugated pipe for a long time one of us alone wouldn't stand a chance against this snake if i had another person we could each pull an end that might be smartest but here we are when he wraps his coils around you he can completely cut off your breathing all right let's see how how i'm doing lengthwise i extended the corrugated pipe as far as i could and i bended it into four lengths and laid it in the bottom of the container and so i think that's as good as i'm going to be able to get it i wish i had another oh eight inches on either end but i think this is going to be pretty good right now this end of the pipe i really don't want soil getting up into the pipe and since we have this nylon sock on here anyway i'm just going to go ahead and use that i'm going to put an elastic band around each of these ends to prevent soil from going inside these tubes [Music] the next piece of this project is to put in a water input pipe and i'm using a piece of pvc that i had laying around in my basement i've cut it on an angle so that when it goes down to the bottom of the container the water can still flow out if i had put this flat side down water would get stuck in the pipe and i'm going to cut a hole into this french drain corrugated pipe to accept this coming in and then the water will go from when i take the hose i'll put the hose down this pipe and it will go into the french drain corrugated pipe as the water reservoir input now on the corner there's a lot of plastic that's all bunched up and it'll be more challenging to cut so i'm actually going to come over here onto this side area and cut right there [Applause] [Music] all right so that it will be a nice tight fit in there perfect okay so the water will be inside these pipes and soil will be touching the pipes on all sides and so the soil will wick up the water from inside this perforated pipe and it will soak up into the garden soil or the container soil for the container we don't want the corrugated pipe to be 100 full of water because then the roots will over saturate and they'll actually rot what we need is a little bit of air space inside those corrugated pipes at the top of the pipe so we need to allow for an overflow drain so i'm going to be using a piece of garden hose and i'm going to drill a hole through the side of the box through the pond liner and into the corrugated pipe and then when the water hits this garden hose inside the corrugated pipe the excess will drain out the side and leave air space in that corrugated pipe for the roots to have some air circulation so i'm going to be drilling a hole to accept this pipe [Music] now i need a hole into my corrugated pipe [Music] okay excellent now i have my water fill tube here going down into the water reservoir which are these four lengths of corrugated pipe that are perforated to allow the water to seep out and i also have a length of garden garden hose that's going from inside the top of the pipe out the side of the container and out over here so when you fill the water into this pipe you just watch to see when the water runs out that hole and then you know that it is full okay so our self-watering container is done it is ready for soil to be put in i don't have any soil right now so i'm going to have to go to the store and get soil and i haven't decided what i'm planting in here yet that's another exciting adventure to come so uh for today this portion of the video is done but i'll be back very quickly don't go away we'll be right back finishing up this project [Music] the next step in the self-watering raised bed container is to mix up something a kind of soil that is very very easily able to wick water up from the bottom up into the upper soil this soil that i'm going to mix up is not the planting soil this is just the wicking material the soil will sit around those french drain pipes it will absorb the water that's in the pipes and wick that water up into the planting soil so what am i going to use for this well i think i'm just gonna use a mix of peat moss and vermiculite now i had trouble finding vermiculite in large bags around here for some reason so i ended up buying four of these very small bags of vermiculite and i'm just gonna make do with that so i'm gonna get some peat in here and then i'll mix things together now i only need enough of this soil to fill to roughly like a half inch above the french drain so it may look like i'm not going to be having enough here but this one i think will be sufficient to cover the french drain pipes in the bottom and um have about a half inch above them because they do take up most of the room in the bottom of the container i was aiming for a 50 50 mix of vermiculite and peat but i i didn't get enough vermiculite to make that happen but this will be pretty close hopefully good enough [Music] okay so i have a beautiful mix of peat and vermiculite here i would say it's almost exactly 50 50 in terms of volume of each product so this is great now the next thing because peat and vermiculite are both they're both very moisture retentive but they also can be repellent to water if they start out very dry so i'm actually going to water this and get it a little bit moist before i put it in the bottom of the raised bed because i don't want um well because i want to get this off to a great start wicking water and wicking moisture i don't want it to repel the water that goes in first because it's too dry okay i think this is really good it's got a nice moist quality to it it sticks to my hands when i pick it up and drop it so yeah so here is our container after a couple of days where we've had some pretty good rain we got leaves in there we got water standing in there and some dead cicadas oh well too bad for them all right so but this is good news because what we see is that the bottom is watertight so that's excellent so now it's time to put the wicking soil which is the mix of peat and vermiculite into the bottom here on top of these pipes so this part of the task is a little fiddly because i can't get my wheelbarrow back in there [Music] well that was just about perfect i have about one more bucket left of this material and i need to put a little bit more over on this end over here but otherwise this is really good we're covering the pipes by about an inch maybe a half inch in some spots and we're down between all the pipes this is perfect very happy okay this is the end of my mix so let's cover up this end a little bit better all right that is perfect we've got all the pipes covered uh these will push down once the heavier soil gets on top of them so yeah there we go that's perfect okay so the next and final step to preparing our raised bed self-watering container is to put in the soil that the plants will live in i've chosen to pick up these this organic raised bed mix so this mix is from harvest organics i got it at lowe's and in this mix it has uh uh let's see peat or forest products and more peat and limestone and chicken litter poultry litter and i tell you what when i was bringing this home from the garden center my car smelled like a chicken house which was not all that pleasant anyway so i bought eight of these these are two cubic feet each and i think it's going to be enough to fill up my container so let's see i might call in my husband to see if he can help me with this job but let me try one [Music] that wasn't too hard let me do another one [Music] okay so here's the thing i don't want to fill it like all the way to the here all the way across because i do need to put soil uh i do need to put root balls in here and depending what i'm planting i'm going to need a lot of room for the root balls so i think what i'm going to do today is put in one more bag and then i'm going to make a well in it like this so that my edges are all buried but i have room in here to plant root balls and then i'm gonna keep those other two bags available so that if i have to fill in after i've planted i'll be able to uh but that i just don't want to be taking soil out too much to have to plant so that's my plan here but i also haven't decided what i'm planning in this video okay i think this is definitely full enough um there is a little bit of a dip in the center um all my edges are covered just definitely what i want so the container has got its self-watering mechanism in the bottom it's got the wicking soil on top of the mechanism it's got planting soil on top of that and that's the one last thing i want to make sure that you guys see and that is filling up the the fill tube and how the drain works so let me pull the camera around and show you that okay this is the drain tube water will come out of here once the water has hit the three inch mark inside the french drain pipes it might take a minute but let's see here we go there it comes see the water coming out of there that means that we have filled our tube to the level we want we can turn this off and now what that does is it lets air be in the top inch of that tube and so the roots don't drown they have access to an air pocket and yet the wicking soil that's around the pipes can still wick the water up into the soil so it's a perfect system i'm eager to get things planted in here and have a beautiful relatively low maintenance garden bed in the side yard here thank you so much for joining me here at harmony hills home and garden today i hope that you will try a project like this in your backyard it doesn't have to be this scale you can do it on a much smaller scale but do you have self-watering containers have you done a diy version let me know in the comments below what you've done and what methods have worked for you i'd love to learn because you know we all have probably all of us have more than one container and so different styles can work in different containers thanks again for joining me today i hope to see you again in a future video have a great day friends bye you

Channel: Harmony Hills Home and Garden

Views: 72,404

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Id: o51LhWqHisA

Length: 21min 17sec (1277 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021