Do you forget to water your seedlings? Kill more than you grow, and give up? Try this.......
Yep, I start off each year with the idea of growing tomatoes and perhaps the odd cucumber in the plastic walk-in greenhouse. All starts off well, I start them off indoors, they germinate, I pot on, they grow a few inches and I put them in the greenhouse (too cold to go straight outside here in the UK). That is quite often the death knell! If it is raining, as it often is here, I don't venture into the garden so I forget to go and water them and that's it, they're dead in no time. Well, I had an idea which seems to be working. We were going to take an old 120 litre fish tank to the refuse tip, it sat in the shed for 6 months!
I hate going to the tip, it's always crowded and I never know which skip to throw things into!
Could I use it for something else? Well, I bought a bag of dust free cat litter from the supermarket (Tesco) the mineral kind, poured it all in the tank and added water to about 3 cm above it. Waited for it to absorb the water, then added the potted plants.
Sorted.
Didn't water them for a couple of days then checked with baited breath. Yeah! No dead plants. After a week or two, the roots were coming out of the bottom of the pots and spreading underneath the gravel. So much so that I had to really tug at them to get the plants out to pot on!
So, if you tend to forget your watering it may be worth giving this idea a try. Maybe you are going away for a few days and don't have anyone to care for your plants. You don't need to use a fish tank, I imagine anything that is deep enough to fit a couple of inches of litter and water to cover it would do.
The pics are from recent plants that I transferred to the tank.
Hopefully this, my first steemit post will be of use to someone out there :)
By the way, you know the bird scarer black cats with marble eyes that you place in your garden? I thought one might deter the cats that keep pooping in our mulch, but wasn't paying the price that they want for them. So, decided to make one from the bottom of a plastic stacking box, couldn't be that hard now could it.
Well, it wasn't. Here is the 'Beast'.
Nailed it!
:)
Good luck and all the best with your steemit journey.
Great idea
Thanks ergo! We don't have a cat by the way, I thought the litter would be ok mixed in with potting soil in my planters. Didn't realise it would soak up the moisture in the soil, so it dried the plants out. I must have thought it would have the same effect as perlite or vermiculite. Doh!
Hey there .... Trying to figure this out.
Me too! Gregory Mannerino on YouTube suggested coming here. I haven't got much of a clue ref crypto currencies etc, so I may well spend this weekend reading 'how to' pages. It took me a while to sus out how to post pictures on here but managed it in the end using photobucket.com :)
Thanks for sharing - I did the same with an old fish tank and it worked fantastically - was thinking about using it to grow lotus in it
The plants are thriving in there. I haven't watered them for 5 days! They are a lovely dark green, no blotches or blemishes. I have been using structured water though which is also doing wonders for the rest of the garden. I cut the top off a 2 ltr water bottle, filled it 3/4 full with pebbles and then ran water through it into a large jug, then poured that back through the bottle again. I did this about 3 times and then used it to feed my plants in the garden (all in pots), they have gone mad! Another thing I have noticed too, is there are no bugs, brown curled leaves, blemishes etc on any of the plants since using the water :)