Hello,
I am new to this group, so please forgive me if this has been discussed before.
I have come to the conclusion that the one best place I can put my garden is on my deck. I do not need a really large garden, just a few tomato plants, some lettuce, a pepper plant or two, etc. As such, I tried a self-watering pot this summer on my deck. It more-or-less worked pretty good. But I am perplexed. It seems that somehow the soil sits on top of a grided plastic shelf (for lack of a better term) and the plants above stay watered. I contend that if there were some sort of wick, the system would work better. Nonetheless, it seemed to work pretty well and I got a lot of tomatoes off the one plant I had in the pot.
As a result, I thought I would build my own planters. Maybe one to start. I was going to use a Rubbermaid plastic container that is fairly shallow but holds eight gallons of water for my experiment. The container is about 42" x 21" (forgive me but I do not remember the depth--it was about 4"-5"). I will put this in a box that is made of composite lumber. I was thinking about using a bulk head fitting to drain the container in the winter. Inside the box, I thought I could put a row of 1x2 just above the plastic container. I would then build a screen using galvanized steel mesh wire using a mesh small enough to keep the soil out of the water. In lieu of that, I would put a piece of screen on top of the mesh.
Do you think this design would work? Do you think a wick of some sort would help? If so, what material would be best? An old T-shirt? Strips of old towel? Nothing?
Or would this be a stupid idea?
Any and all comments welcome!