Make A Dollar Store Self-Watering Garden in 10 Minutes [For 20 BUCKS!]

welcome back i'm david the good and today we are going to make a dollar store self-watering garden a couple of weeks ago i traveled down to a wedding in florida and we had a bunch of flats of things that were getting ready to transplant that we hadn't transplanted yet and i said man if we're not here for a week and these aren't getting watered they're all going to die so what i did was i put my transplants into this taller flat right here so there's a little more soil in there and then i stuck them in these old restaurant trays that we scavenged and put a little bit of water with a nutrient solution into the bottom of them watered them well and then we left now we got back and they're looking great they're actually looking better than some of the stuff that's planted out in the garden these transplants which should be planted out real soon here are doing fantastically and it's because the water never dries up they're not too flooded but they can get all the water that they need so knowing that this works so well i said let's play around with this idea in the garden we've got some really dry sandy soil and then we get these big rains and everything gets washed and washed and washed and washed and then all that water goes through and a few days later things are drying up again so if we can keep it so there's always a reservoir of water hey that'll grow some pretty plants we have proof of concept right here so today i stopped by the dollar store and i got some supplies i've got some potting soil and i've mixed it with some rotten wood that's just that's not necessary but i sifted through some rotten wood from the woods because i'm cheap and it stretches my potting soil and somebody said the other day what are you doing about why aren't you doing pest control why aren't you controlling those cabbage mods well look first of all i was out of town for a little bit and things got out of hand while we were out of town and second of all i am controlling it a kid with a butterfly net right back there that's that's natural pest control so all you need is to have kids with butterfly nets kiddie pool eight bucks dollar store putting it at the end of this bed right here i've already got trellis over the top of it and uh this is my son's tomato bed and he has transplants so we figured we'd do this in his bed first the other supply i got these are some old pots from a old landscaping project and somebody gave them to me so these pots are going to go in the kiddie pool now there's a problem when you put these pots in here see that okay if this rains and fills up there's gonna be water up in there too high it's gonna be like to there and you don't want that what you need is actually you need some roots that are gonna be able to breathe so i've got these rescue pavers which should mitigate that situation the other thing you can do is just knock holes in the side of the pool and stick them right in the bottom that's probably the easier thing to do you don't need rescue pavers they just felt like they needed to be employed somehow [Applause] i want to thank terry terry berg who sent me this cool transplanter it's similar enough to a machete that i i feel good about it it's really neat and it's it's sharp so it's the sort of thing that i can interest myself on which is just natural to me you could plant tomatoes deep but i don't actually want to plant these too deep because i don't want them to drown so i'm just planting them right about ground level just in case i plant the stems too deep down in there i don't want them to not have roots above the water line if you've got some roots that are in the water that's fine usually but you have to have some so it can breathe this is going to be an amazing mess of tomatoes all on top of each other right here [Music] [Music] that [Music] and you is see the water rising around the bottom of all those pots that he got in those pots that he scavenged all those hot sauce wait a minute [Music] now the cool thing about this sort of thing is is each one of these pots is modular which means if i go in a little while you know what these tomatoes are really getting too big and it's kind of ridiculous i can move a few of them if i were to arrange this properly like if i had other transplants like something that would be tiny and weeny and pointless like lettuce i would put the lettuces in a circle around a central tomato but these guys i'm just going to grow them big in these pots and if i have to i will stick them in their own self-watering gardens in another spot if they get too big for this area but for right now this gives me a good start and i am watering them from the top because since they've been transplanted they don't really have much in the way of roots but those roots are gonna go down into the reservoir and they're going to stay moist enough even on a really hot and nasty day the other question that i know i'm going to get asked because it's the question i would ask myself is what about mosquitoes i mean this is the south if you have water sitting for more than 10 seconds it's suddenly full of mosquito larvae it's uh it was proven long ago that standing water spontaneously generates mosquitoes particularly in the south and so you've got water sitting here this is this is this is going to be full of mosquito larvae in a you know a few days well all you got to do is get some of those little mosquito dunk things and stick them in there or you can put a little bit of oil in the water to cover the top not like diesel or 10 w30 but a little mineral oil or something like that you could stick on the top i don't like that very much because it makes everything all gunky and it makes the it makes this weird varnishy coating on containers but i had very good luck with mosquito dunks or the little pellets my friend mart hale used those and they are a natural control and that's a that's a really easy way to head off the mosquitoes the other thing you can do is just take them out and dump it every week or so you just dump it in your other gardens and then refill it but that seems like too much work i have this homemade nutrient solution you can stick a little miracle grow in here or you could put some fish emulsion in here or whatever liquid fertilizer you wanted to you have all kinds of options this is literally the only time it's okay to pee in the pool it will grow tomatoes it's safe and it's natural actually if you don't want to do it that way obviously just stick a little bit of a and any kind of nutrient solution in there and that will give the extra benefit of what is called fertigation fertilizing and irrigating at the same time which will grow you some amazing amazing plants we should get some beautiful tomatoes out of this this is a cherry tomato which cherry tomatoes grow much better in the hot and in our climate than most other tomatoes if we were trying for beef steaks it probably wouldn't work cherry tomatoes should do just fine and i'll keep you guys apprised on how this goes over time this is a fun little experiment i've seen a lot of different methods but back when i had my plant nursery i used to take plants pots and stick them in there on hot dry days and put a little nutrient solution in there put some pots in there they would soak up the water from there and it kept them going and it's a really cheap way to do it it doesn't take a lot of effort so thanks for joining me catch you all next time be sure to like and subscribe and all that cool stuff and stay tuned for updates until next time may your thumbs always be green i'm burying my rabbit beneath the cherry tree one fine afternoon someday i know that we'll meet again on a fruit salad spoon i had to go to a wedding in florida i say had to it sounds like it's a terrible thing like somebody forced me to go to a wedding no it was a nice wedding nice people the best people probably at this point i should switch to something smaller other than tomatoes people be like david why did you plant so many tomatoes next to each other it's just because they happen to be what was in the flat at that time i'm not telling you to plant them all on top of each other i'm just doing it casually on youtube casually sticking a whole bunch of them together it'll be fine

Channel: David The Good

Views: 456,241

Keywords: gardening, composting, David The Good, tropical gardening

Id: 9vpYrqTN-LM

Length: 11min 26sec (686 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021