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Homemade Automatic Plant Watering System
Homemade Automatic Plant Watering System. Giving your outdoor plants water each day and your indoor plants water on a regular basis is the bottom line when it comes to keeping them alive. You can create a homemade automatic plant watering system in order to do this. You don't need to spend a fortune on yard or home watering systems, in fact, you...
Giving your outdoor plants water each day and your indoor plants water on a regular basis is the bottom line when it comes to keeping them alive. You can create a homemade automatic plant watering system in order to do this. You don't need to spend a fortune on yard or home watering systems, in fact, you can create a system for watering both your indoor and outdoor plants quite easily. David Harvey, plant doctor with Harvey's Nursery near Brookings, South Dakota, shares some suggestions.
Indoor Watering
Figure out how much water your indoor plants need, and then develop a system to water them. If you are going to be gone or if you don't want to think about watering your plants, it is easy to develop a system for automatic watering. Use plastic containers, like cottage cheese containers and sour cream containers, from your local grocery store. Clean them out completely and dry them, along with their lids.
Take an Exacto knife and slice the bottom of your containers. For plants that need a very moist and wet environment, make an X. For plants that don't need as much water, make one slash. Set the container in the dirt next to the plant. Keep in mind that you will need to use smaller containers for plants with smaller pots. Fill the container with water. As the soil dries out, more water will leak out of the container and into the soil. However, the dirt should plug up the holes, so when the dirt is wet, more water won't leak out. This is a way to make an automatic watering system for indoor plants.
Outdoor Watering
Set up a system for watering your outdoor plants. Take a garden hose and make several slices in it with an Exacto Knife. The slices should be no more than a fraction of an inch long and should be about three to four inches apart across the hose. Connect one end of the hose to a sprinkler in the center or end of your garden. Snake the hose through your entire garden so it flows through most of it. Attach the other end of the hose to a timer, and then to a faucet. A water timer can allow water to go through the hose for a certain amount of time each day or during a certain time frame each day. Set your timer to the proper setting and allow the hose to work for you. Turn the hose on and the timer will control when water flows through the hose to the sprinkler, and when it does not.
