Container Cultivation

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If you use traditional containers, plan to water at least once a day, and more often for large plants or during hot, dry or windy weather. A mature tomato plant needs a gallon of water a day. There’s no wiggle room here; vegetable plants that don’t get enough water when they need it become stressed, and don’t produce as well. This means that a traditional container gardener has to be available to water the garden once a day — or more than once — every day.

Traditional containers are best watered just before they need it. You want to avoid stressing the plants by letting the soil go dry, but don’t want to water more frequently than is necessary because you do have other things to do. In my experience the critical variable here is time; it takes a certain number of hours for a plant of a certain size in a container of a certain size to use up the available water. Because water use varies with the age and size of a plant, I usually water everything whenever the thirstiest plants need water, just to keep things as simple as possible.

Gardens That Water Themselves

Looking for a way to cut back on how often I had to water my container garden, I tried self-watering containers and found that I needed to water much less often. Self-watering containers with big tomato or squash plants, or closely spaced lettuce or mesclun mixes, needed water every three or four days, but younger, smaller plants got by with water once a week. No plants needed daily watering. These containers make it possible for the container gardener to have a life beyond the garden.

I also got a nice surprise: I found that virtually all the vegetable plants I grow in my regular gardens grow at least as well in self-watering containers. Some grow better. Artichokes or eggplant can’t be conventionally grown in my area due to the short season, but in a self-watering container, they grow fast enough. Why?

It appears that water is the key. As long as there is water in the reservoir, the soil throughout the container is always moist, and the plants growing in it always have enough water, but not too much. In a traditional container, the soil contains as much water as it can hold only for a short time after watering. From then on, the soil — and the plants growing in it — have progressively less water available. Plants become stressed and suffer some interruption of growth whenever they have insufficient water, and self-watering containers eliminate that possibility.

Most self-watering containers are rectangular plastic, in some shade of green or brown. But there also are round, square and hanging containers in many other colors. They have various ways to get the water from the reservoir to the soil, and different ways to add water to the reservoir and register the water level. And, in my experience, they all work, although some inexpensive containers advertised as self-watering have reservoirs that are too small to offer any advantage over traditional containers.

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