Beginner Gardening: eContainers with colander ?, 0 by dreaves

dreaves wrote:
Here is a picture with all the parts fully assembled. I made the watering tube out of 1" PVC, since I had a hole-saw just that size. The plastic of the colander was soft enough that it could have been cut with shears. The tape around the water tube is just to be sure that too much soil didn't leak into the water reservoir while it was being packed.

For the overflow tube, I used straws from McDonalds. I found them to be slightly thicker material and slightly larger in diameter than all the other straws I checked. The seem to be fairly durable. The hole-size requred for the bucket was 5/16". I did use shears to cut one of the plastic strips between slots enough to allow the straw to pass through. The air-gap between the colander bottom (top of airspace) and the drain straw was about 1-inch. It's radius is about half the bucket, so there is plenty of soil packed below the water level.

I used a potting mix to fill, since that was all I could find easily (and cheaply). I packed the soil by hand as tightly as I could around the colander, then packed the remaining mix a little more loosely, but still tight. Hopefully it will wick correctly. The total water volume should be somewhere near 1.5 gallons, but I didn't measure it.

David