Gerry,

Wicking is very interesting the way you do it. The container forum really gets into this area of discussion. I assume you are just using one-gallon pots. Do you use anything bigger? Does it work with say 5 or 18 gallon containers? Let us know how your experiment is progressing. Great stuff. aloha

Funny you should ask. Yesterday, I put together a horse trough wick watering setup. Metal round trough, about three feet across. I have a big stack of fairly tough 9-inch tall plastic pots. I set five around the inside and one in the center, upside down. I cut a wedge out of the side of each so that water would flow unobstructed, and the pots wouldn't displace much. I have some expanded aluminum from the recycler and cut a disc of that to set on top of the pots. I have from heavy synthetic burlap-like cloth from the dump rescue and cut a larger disc from that. That will be the barrier between the soil and water. I cut four lengths of 1-1/2 pvc pipe to run from the bottom to about half way up the soil area. Each of those has three lengths of 1/2-inch nylon rope with a few inches out the bottom and ten inches out the top. There's a bevel cut at the bottom of those tubes to allow the rope to not be pinched. And there's another pipe from the bottom to the top rim as a filler, drilled multiple times at its bottom end.

I filled the soil area up to the top of the wick pipes and spread the wicks, then filled the rest of the way. I also drilled a hole nine inches from the bottom. That's an overflow in case of rain or over filling. I'm watching it now, testing moisture to see how it does. It takes a while for a new installation to stabilize, for the soil equilibrium to set up between the water, wicks and soil.

If this works, I'll have a 40 gallon reservoir, actually a bit less because the plastic in the pots and the various pipes displace some. But it's still enough to self-water for a long time. I don't have a good feel for the interaction between the rope wicks and soil wicking that could disperse water from there. Probing different places with the moisture meter should be revealing. But my guess is that it's all just a matter of scale and that any given type and size of wick has a maximum capacity to move water, and I took a shot at a total of 12 1/2-inch nylon rope wicks for this one.

Gerry,

Very intersting. I use the Earthtainer II type of SWC. My soil wick supplies too much water for my tomatoes. I was thinking of constricting the soil column that sits in the reservoir to only holes in the bottom, but I think I might try your wicking method instead to limit the amount of water getting into the soil. Time to experiment. I am also trying the automatic filling that is suggested for SWCs. I will be using a large trash can that feeds my container reservoirs. The water level will be controlled with an automatic float switch. I obtained the float switches and other fittings from The Valve Shop. Let me know how your experiments works. Aloha

One of my wonderings is if there's much difference in the efficiency of wick materials. It seems wicking efficiency depends on large surface area, i.e. many small fibers. And I assume a fine soil would be reasonably efficient for the same reason.

The first 24 hours of the trough setup with 12 rope wicks in four groups of three is kind of inconclusive. I found that most of the wicks had been pulled down along side their pipes as I filled in the soil on top of that level, so I had to dig down and pull the rope ends up and spread them. We'll see what happens now. And I did not "jump start" the process by manually wetting the soil. Anecdotal accounts suggest prewetting the soil will get the wicking started more efficiently. But I wanted to see quickly what the rope wicks would do, without seeing the moisture I had added by hand. If it still seems to be slow starting to day, I'll wet it down. I do not think it's going to by too much water from the rope wicks.

(It's also 104-degrees every day, which is probably warping the experiment a bit, too.)

I have a lot of question about wicks that I can't find answers for. One is about constriction. For instance, in your soil wick columns, could you insert a sort of donut that necked the soil down at that point? Would that constriction slow things down? What will happen if I tie a ligature around the rope wick? How does that effect flow? Is it the same as using a smaller rope wick for the whole length? Do such things even matter?

gerry,

Here are some threads from the Container Forum:

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/contain/msg0319460030822.html?5

http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/contain/msg072001511728.html?7

Interesting. I am setting up my container and will experiment with different materials. I would like to find the number of wicks to give just enough water to the soil. Aloha

Aloha

This is an old post, but any updates to your system?

How did everything turn out?

I have a gutter reservoir system, but having a wick form container to closed pipe sounds even better. My concern would be that water would "find its level" and make the bottom of the pot a wet mess or just continually ( slowly ) dump water out through the drain holes.