Make your own Drought Busting Ollas Inexpensively

hello today we're going to be making oils I'm going to use this terracotta pot and saucer to make an ancient technology developed in North Africa essentially they would put terracotta pots in the ground and fill them with water and they'd have really lush gardens for as arid as that places so what we're gonna do today is to make them essentially this pot and saucer it cost three dollars and fifty cents and it's the same volume of ways that you can buy online you say well I can just buy one online well they're $40 a piece that's what I've been seeing online so I'm gonna make these for three dollars and fifty cents all materials included so come on home with me and we're gonna make these drought busting buddies together okay come on a lot okay so I'm going to be running a bead of around these plates here it is waterproof of course and it dries in 30 minutes it's ready for water mold free for 10 years all right so let's go ahead and get that underway [Applause] this will not only bond the pot to the saucer but it will also create a liquid tight seal that will keep the water from rushing at the mortar I will use momentarily easy hey that looks really good they're fitting together really nice and firm there's a nice bead now here's the the key here is I'm going to be filling this with mortar just standard mortar mix you know for bricks this is terracotta so it will hold to it and it's just one more line of defense to keep that water from just like pouring out and it won't and it's gonna leach out of the sides here kind of excited about this looks real good so we'll be back in 30 minutes we're gonna put the mortar on I've got my mortar mix ready to go here so I'm gonna go ahead and get started on that it's a little messy this mortar will create a lifetime bond to the terra cotta pot though I colorized it this certainly does not need to be done if you've seen my how to cast sunflowers video then you can understand why I added some color to this normally gray mortar okay so that looks good enough for me remember it's going underground you know using gray mortar is just perfectly fun but it's looking good I'm liking what I see and so I'm gonna go ahead and do the rest and I'll show you I'm all finished okay okay you can see that they're all set it's gonna take about ten days for the mortar to dry you can see that the water is already wicking up here that's the beauty of these and the genius of the ancient north africans you know using in there these in their gardens to make them lush brilliant idea anyways these will dry in about ten days and I'll be pouring water in here and it will be coming out this way into my potted plants and I'm hoping to conserve 90% water and once again I won't have to be watering every day it's been about ten days since these right I'll show you that there's water in here see that there's water water water and water I'm gonna let this run for an hour I'll speed up the video so that you know you don't sit here and tap your thumbs but essentially we're looking for water wicking after this one our example I'm showing you which I did on a Saturday I left them on the table and they continued wicking from that Saturday to Friday which is six days it may increase or decrease in time I know that the pots they will be placed in are in the hottest location of my yard when the 100 degrees sizzling Summer Sun hits my potted plants they should cut my watering frequency from daily to roughly every 4 or 5 days hey now I'll be able to take a summer vacation this particular Oya has a watering capacity of one and a half quarts or 48 ounces here's my second version of my drought busting buddies this buster requires no the plastic bottle was purchased at the dollar store for $1 and the pot I will put it in was less than - this particular ayah has just over a 1 quart capacity or 34 ounces for the next technique we've got the holes drilled and we're ready to put the mortar in so I've got mortar mixed here at Sun colored and I what I'm gonna do is fill this hole the bottom first I'm just gonna create a round ball mortar yeah drop it right in there that should create about a half of an inch or so a little too much I'm gonna take just a little bit out okay looks good looks real good okay so what I'm going to do here now is use this perlite this is you know for garden soil I mix my own garden soil so I have a lot of this around you can buy a small bag of it it's your garden shop anywhere little messy but this is gonna keep the mortar from going into the pot the pot is very porous I get it up to there it looks pretty good to me okay now we're gonna seal this guy off straighten it out just a little bit super easy job here you can see put it on by hand kind of pushing it in of course that's where I'm wearing the gloves this is very caustic once again you don't want this to come in contact with your skin get a little bit on you that's okay but just don't want to have this a long period of time when you're screwing let me get this nice and I squeeze it in there over in smooth it out a tad okay okay so these are also six inch pots these are six inch plates or saucers I'm going to go ahead and put these on here I'm going to put a bead of first and slip them on there right like that if you're interested in using only you know silicon this would be the method for you I like the idea of using mortar because I feel it'll last a lifetime you'll get probably eight to ten years of really good service out of these I feel that these will last a lifetime but the mortar step I realized for some of you it may be too complicated so we're going to go ahead and lay down some and I'll show you this really quick you in part two of this video I will show the oIA's being used in my garden pots I will discuss why I am placing them in a particular pot I will also show you how to get the most effective water saving technique for unglazed terracotta pots I hope you watch part 2 if you have a question I will respond and thank you for watching

Channel: Do It Yourselfer Home and Garden Guy

Views: 427,458

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Id: e7xckIcdBDA

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020