New Grower How to water plants whilst away?

[awolace]

In a couple of weeks i will be going away for about 3 days? I currently have two plants on the go that will be drinking 3l of feed every 24 hours. I obviously need to come up with a way to keep them moist whilst i am away. They are in 10l airpots with soil and perlite.

My first thought was to place each plant in a builders bucket with perlite or a soil/perlite mix and water in the bottom and stand the pot in it and hope that it draws the moisture up. The second was to create some sort of gravity fed syphon/wick system?

Im sure other people have had to solve this issue before so any help would be appreciated.

 

[LED Borg]

Hi mate,
For a gravity fed timed system. get a water reservoir ie, flexi tank (smallest they do is 100L maybe too large?) or a 25L camping water jerry can with a tap at the bottom and hole a top, put that onto a chair/table higher than your pots, attach some pipe to bottom
put other end of pipe into your pot with a stake and that's your drip irrigation system, just adjust the tap on the reservoir to feed slow or fast.. now to time it, you would have to get a drip irrigation timer (google search it bro) to put onto the feed pipe itself,
they basically just turn a tap on or off to your timed settings.

for electric pump timed, exactly the same but put the pump on the feed line and timer to the pump.
Personally I used gravity fed drip irrigation but I am drawing closer to getting a proper timer set up, been looking at the airpot RTA system as I already have half the kit, pots, trays etc..

or most people would say the bottom feeding system, like autopot, works well but im a great believer in plants shouldn't drink what they run off.
just my thoughts on it bro.

 

[awolace]

I was thinking of doing something like this, in effect it would just be like doubling/tripling the size of the pot for a few days, I would water the whole thing before i went with 10l feed and it should last them until i get back. When i return i would just remove the airpot and the roots would just airtrim themselves. The soil top layer would stop light penetration to standing water, and lots of people have a perlite bottom layer in their pots anyway? opinions?

 

[BigSm0]

I'm sure this is what led Borg said but I would put a pump in a bucket or barrel plumbed to your plants to turn on with one of those analog timers. That should buy you a day extra. Or if it kicked in daily for 15 minutes that might be tough to coordinate how much they end up getting.

 

[Ozone69]

Blumat makes something like these or HydroSpike brand are (I think) a little easier to find in the US. They draw from a water jug that you set next to it and use the porus nature of the cone to low tech measure the moisture in the soil and turn up/down the flow.

 

[Gatorbackbob]

I went on a week long vacation and a water wick kept mine alive, I just filled up a 2 liter bottle with ph water, cut strips from an all cotton old tshirt about twice the length of the bottle, punched the one side into the dirt, and the other to the bottom of the bottle, after the week was up, it was all used up and needing water bad, but she survived. If I remember right, the watering container had to be elevated higher than the soil line

 

[AnxiousGrower]

Blumat makes something like these or HydroSpike brand are (I think) a little easier to find in the US. They draw from a water jug that you set next to it and use the porus nature of the cone to low tech measure the moisture in the soil and turn up/down the flow.

That's pretty cool.

 

[Cptn Feathersword]

I built a gravity fed drip system with a recirculating feed that works amazing.
Basically its a bucket that sits up high with hoses that feed the plants. This top bucket is supplied water from a larger bucket via a pump on an analog timer. The top bucket has an over flow hose half way up that feeds back to the reservoir to avoid spills.

Flow is controlled by nozzles at the end of each individual hose. My nozzles are the little red adaptors that you get with a can of butane lighter fluid refill. They work really well.

 

[LED Borg]

yeah bro, my mate used to use the same sort of thing, 25L container hanging up with 13mm pipes coming from it, going to smaller 4mm feed pipes which are in the pot themselves.
As timing goes, he was using a gravity garden water timer, all worked very well. But now he's got the 'improvement bug' and going to pump fed to feed his ladies and also has one of those control brain buckets that drain to waste (or recirculate)
by a float inside. Air pot one, apparently the IWS versions leak from the bottom grommet's when they've been taken apart and cleaned, this may of been sorted now tho as they have a version II out.
But as airpots and the rta trays are also being used, seemed sense to stick with the airpot control bucket.