How to make non-toxic Wicking Bed from IBC Tote for Organic Garden

hi this is rowan with rowan creates and today we're going to be taking a 250 gallon tote it's a food grade safe plastic and we're going to make make it into actually two wicking water beds that are non-toxic [Music] so so so [Music] these have all been cut so now we have two pieces we do have because it is metal we do have jagged edges and so i'm going to take a grinder and smooth these out of course safety glasses and hearing protection for this phase and you take equal parts and then you mix them together and because we just ground the metal we don't have to do anything further to it but if this metal had um rust or oils on it or anything like that you would want to like take a wire brush to it or use wax and grease remover because you have to have something solid for this to apply so that it stays on there and now i just put it on here cover up everything that was cut so then that won't rust and then also any other sharp edges are smoothed out and if there is any minute openings where water could get in that'll be sealed too still got an opening there so rather than spending time filling it with jb weld it's faster just to re crimp it with the bolt cutter there and now we'll grind it start with drilling a pilot hole then putting the jigsaw in and just cutting this in half and earlier when i used the sharpie to mark it i wasn't all that specific because now i'll look i'll start here but my eye is at the end point down there where i'm going to be ending and as long as i keep my eye at the completion i should go in a straight line because your your hand will go where your eyes go [Applause] [Applause] yep and it's a nice straight line okay so after um sawing these in half with the jigsaw i just take the utility knife and scrape along the sides just to remove all these little remains i've seen on youtube a lot of people will paint these since i'm actually a motorcycle painter by trade that's too much work for me because proper prep the plastic primer spraying it the time involved waxing grease remover everything it's too many hours so what i did was i went online and i found a uv wrap so for you get five rolls of this for like i don't know 135 bucks or something like that so to me that's much more efficient use of my time and money so i'm going to use this if you have two people it'd probably be easier but since it's just me i take good old gorilla tape because it's one of my favorite things to use it's got good holding power and the main point about this is we don't want the sun to be reacting with the water that's going to be in the reservoir and growing plant plant life so we have to prevent we have to block the uv rays from getting through to that so truthfully i only have to have from here to here protected because this is the only place that water is going to be but i'll do this whole thing because it gives it a nice look and then just this much and i don't have to trim anything and i'll just put two layers of this around the whole thing and of course i'm making several of these you're only making one which would be two when you cut it in half it might be more economical for you to paint this and maybe you like doing it with a spray can well then do it that way but since i'm making probably 16 of these in total i wanted to make the best use of my time and money and that was finding this wrap was really really sweet i found it on uline.com they're a shipping company [Music] i'm gonna have this tucked under here just so if i ever have to drain it for some reason i have that option we don't want any openings so i'll take the black gorilla tape and i'll tape up any any of those and for the spade for for this drain i'm going to make the hole right about here because that's going to be where my reservoir is and then i still have room for some some other sand some hay and then the soil i don't want to tear this all up so just kind of doing that slowly there we go so okay apparently my speed's pretty darn dull okay and now because this was a little short this is not going to fit i can't just pop it in there so i have to use a file and i'll elongate this hole so that it fits the dimensions of the pipe where is that again where did i put it okay this is a three-quarter inner diameter one inch outer diameter so now i'm not going all the way around because this isn't round it's elongated [Music] i'll just elongate the hole let's cut this right away see about about this far what is that about five inches just had a sliver go up my fingernail cut it out though and then you squish it to get the blood and then that way if anything went in that wasn't supposed to like any contaminants bacteria whatever bleed it out there my first aid tip of the day okay so now i've got this if i was just to put it in there well mosquitoes could fly in there and they could lay eggs that wouldn't be good or have something clog it we don't want to deal with that because once this is built we want to keep it good it's not fun to redo things so about one third of this what i'm using is window screen copper window screen because the way i figure it copper's been used in water systems forever without problems our body can take up the copper as long as it's not too much of it so that'll work for me so i'll just wrap this around here and i'll take a zip lock no that still stings sorry about swear word and when i have a choice between white or black zip ties if it's coming in contact with food in any way i go with white just because i've smelled black plastic and it can really smell bad be smelly really bad okay so come on you turd there much better word right okay like that one okay nice and tight so now you can see how that's protected sniff off the rest of this now we get that to go into the hole i do like folding this over here just a little bit feels like a little bit extra insurance that it won't come out you have to be careful though because it's wire it'll poke you just like wood will [Music] the least amount of pain the bigger the wind and since i had the oil in this the sunflower oil or cooking oil i'm just going to use a little bit of it to lube this up and hopefully it'll help it slide in better ah finally come on get in there it's a tight fit that's for sure there barbs on both these areas with the facing upward i'm able to fill up the reservoir to this level and i'll just actually see the water fill up through here too letting me know what this is at and the only reason i might want to do that is because see the plants aren't looking very healthy i want to oxygenate i want to pull oxygen into the soil so i'll fill it up to here and then i'll twist this now let everything drain which will pull that down which will pull oxygen down into the soil deeper but most the time i just keep it like this because this is outside if it rains it'll just keep stay at a constant next gotta find put something down that we can fill it with i just went to the hardware store and looked through their food grade safe and they have these pre-cut they come in two foot lengths one and a quarter inch inner diameter one and three quarters outer diameter and they work just fine and what's nice is i can put a hose in here and just leave it and let it fill up but since they're already pre-cut at two feet you can see it's a little bit longer than it needs to be especially if this was like straightened so i went on ebay and i found a roll because again i'm doing 16 of these so i wanted to be a little bit more efficient with my money and not waste them so with this i can cut it to the exact length that i want versus having them pre-cut in two foot lengths that i'm only going to use one part i don't know 18 16 inches of it i don't know i i haven't measured it just use your eye use your best judgment anyway so since we still have one of these left i'll go ahead and use it before open those up don't need the tag but we don't want to have it flat because if it's just flattened there it's possible that it'll not fill correctly so i'm going to just give this little edge not a little edge what would be a good bevel to it uh angle this is gonna fall so pretty simple so now when it's flat it'll still be able to let water in okay so that'll keep in place and now i'm ready to put in whatever i'm going to use for a reservoir it weighs a lot the rocks are of course much heavier than the four inch irrigation pipe that a lot of people seem to use but i don't like the plastic that's used in irrigation pipe so i'm not gonna do that so instead i put some big rocks down so that we got our cover right here this goes down there everything's good [Music] now i do not want the sand going into the reservoir because that would just end up plugging the the hole the drain hole so i'll get a little bit in there and then i'll place it exactly where i want it so that it holds the fabric up against the walls that way sand won't leak into the bottom sand is also better at wicking than a lot of other materials so the sand will actually assist the water in coming up and contacting the soil and watering the bed from underneath okay next i'll pull this up to the next station which is where the hay is and i'll put a layer of hay in there i would have used straw except we didn't get oh i should put some more right here because that's not totally covered there but straw works better because of the seeds but we had a really wet fall so the farmers weren't able to go and harvest the straw last fall and here's what's available so here's what i'm going to use okay so now i'm going to drag this up [Applause] otherwise you'll have to mend it to make it into good soil and there's lots of videos online [Music] you can break up the big bumps you know anything strange it's probably plate but this is really nice soil [Applause] okay so then we just cover this up with a can tin foil whatever basically so mosquitoes don't like go down in there and lay eggs so this is the final product we got a wicking bed ready to go all we have to do is put our plants in here if we want we can add deer bird netting to do that i just put some stakes in the corners zip tied them into place and then attach the netting and then to make extra sure that the deer didn't get caught up in there i added some bags on here just so that it'd be some movement but that's it wicking beds

Channel: Rowan Creates

Views: 59,553

Keywords: Self watering, SIP, sub-irrigation, organic, non toxic, ibc container

Id: 1N3W2WemhV4

Length: 28min 27sec (1707 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021