Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Recycling Glass Bottles: Self Watering Plant Devices



Those Aqua Globes are great, but free and recycled for me is even better. So I decided to try something with recycled glass bottles. The sizes and colors of glass bottles are diverse. I think you can get some pretty bottles that serve form and function, just soak the labels off.

I've only tried this with one plant, and I still have not seen if this works well. It's still a bit of an experiment, but I took a cleaned and empty plum wine bottle, filled it with water, and poked very small holes into the top. I pushed the neck of the bottle into the soil, and if this works it should drip water slowly into the plant(drip irrigation). In theory, it should work, but I may need larger or more holes. This is not the prettiest of self waterers, but it's hidden under to foliage.

Tiny vanilla bottles can be used with small plants, soda or beer bottles with medium sized plants, and wine bottles for the largest. I'm going to try this outdoors in the vegetable garden as well. I like the idea of using glass self watering devices with the edibles. I don't trust the chemicals that leech out of plastic bottles.

You can purchase plant nannies which are terracotta attachments for wine bottles, but really I think poking holes in a cork/screw top will work just as well.

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