Hi I'm Trisha Shirey. We're all looking for efficient ways to water our vegetable gardens and today, designer Colleen Deiter is joining me to show us how to make ollas. Colleen, what exactly is an olla? So, olla is the spanish word for pot and basically what this is is it's a clay pot that is porous and you bury it in your garden and the water slowly seeps out. I've found that if I'm gardening in raised beds, sometimes the raised beds will get kind of like a crusty layer on the top. Sure, that dry faster. You know, a lot of people have that problem ... yeah, and the water, when you go to water with the hose, sometimes the water will just sort of pool on the top or even run off the sides of the bed. So the ollas deliver the water directly to the roots. [mhmm] And it's a great way to give plants that need a little extra water what they need in a landscape too. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's really good for tomatoes because they need more even waterings. So it helps because the water seeps out so slowly, it helps keep the water in the soil longer. Sure. And it's a more even watering so it's not drying out so fast [mhmm] and then getting wet that fast too. And you could even add fertilizer to the water to feed the plants as well. Right, yeah. Really great for compost tea applications too. To get the compost tea directly into the soil. Perfect! Okay, well I know you can buy them, but you're going to show us a quick and easy way to make our own. Yeah, and I want to thank my friend Cliff Perkins, who came up with this design. And I've seen a couple of others different kinds of designs, and this one ended up being the easiest to use. [mhmm] And one of the key things Trisha too, is to get an azalea pot [mhmm] because the azalea pot is shorter. than a regular flower pot. Yeah, those are the short squatty ones. [mhmm] Short squatty ones. Yes, so look for the azalea pots, most of the nurseries carry them, they're easy to find. But we have the ten inch azalea pot here and a twelve inch saucer. They fit together. Okay, so what's our first step for prepping this saucer? So the first step is to take some gorilla glue and what you're going to do is you're going to spread the gorilla glue around on the inside of the saucer. And you want to cover every inch. Yes, you're going to completely cover it. And you can use like a paint stick to kind of spread it out in there. Because that's going to be thrown away so you don't want to use a brush you'd have to try to clean. Yes, exactly. And probably wear gloves while you're doing this. Yes, yeah, that's really important to try to wear gloves because this gorilla glue can get all over everything. But it dries pretty quickly. Yeah, yeah. And in this instance, it's going to end up on the inside of the olla so you don't have to worry about it drying or anything like that. before you move on to the next step. Okay So then the next step is to use silicon caulk. And basically this particular kind of silicon caulk is for masonry and stone. [mhmm] And you just put a bead of that all the way around the edge of the saucer here like that. A very liberal "bead". Yeah, you want to put it really thick. Okay, and then you also put a bead around the top of your azalea pot. [mhmm] Okay. [mhmm] Like that. You flip the pot over, and you'll be wearing gloves of course, and you place them together like that. Okay? And then to get a really good seal, you put something heavy like a brick on top of it. You'll see the silicon will start to kind of come out from the seam right there and you can come through with some alcohol on a rag, and just kind of wipe it off where it's dripping out too much. Where you have too much [mhmm] And then you let that sit for one hour. After it sits for an hour you fill it with water and you'll be able to see if there's any leaks around the seam. [mhmm] And if there's leaks in that area around the seam, you can come back through with more silicone and just fill those little spots in. Just add it. Because you don't want it to be leaky to where there's going to be too much water coming out of one spot. Sure. Then what you do is you take it out to the garden and you bury it to about right here. [mhmm] So that there's about an inch of the pot sticking out of the ground. And then when you water, you put the water through this hole right here [mhmm] with the hose. And then you put a rock on the top to keep mosquitos from getting in. And so you'd use these in containers, vegetable gardens, many many different applications. Yeah, yeah. Well how far apart would you space these in your garden? Just about every five feet or so. But it depends on the kind of soil you have and what you're growing, you know? [mhmm] Well I think this is an excellent idea for all of us to help our drought stressed plants in our gardens. For Backyard Basics, thanks for joining me. I'm Trisha Shirey and thanks Colleen for joining me. Thanks Trisha! It was fun.
