Saturday, July 5, 2008

More pictures shot June 9th at 1730

Here's a few of Heidi's pictures that show how the automatic watering/siphon system works. On second thought, they don't really tell you much, but it's good practice for me to play around with the pictures.



2 comments:

Erik said...

Hi.
First of all, thanks for all the posts and helpful info. Couldn't have made my garden without you.

I have about 20 planters on my roof that are growing great and producing tons of fruit.
Problem is, I'm leaving town for a week at the end of August and I don't have anybody to water.

So I need to build a system of automatic watering. I noticed from these pics that you've created one yourself (because I'm using buckets I can't use the Earthbox system due to the different container heights).

Could you point me to any instructions you've created or share any pointers you've learned about building an automated watering system? I understand the fundamentals--the water will be level across containers--and I have a whole bunch of tubing and splitters as well as a Hudson valve.

Thanks for any help.
-Erik

Bruce said...

Hi Erik,

I put together two posts on automatic watering, here are links to Part 1 and 2, that should give a basic idea of how to put this together.

Eliminating bubbles is the major challenge.

If you're in Chicago and want to take a look at what I've done on my roof I'd be happy to show you. Send me an email at greenroofgrowers [at] gmail [dot] com and I'll give you the address.

A couple of caveats with my method--It takes some work to set up and it's not foolproof. If you want to be 100% sure that the plants get water, you might want to ask a neighbor to do the watering while you're gone in exchange for some produce.

Good luck.