My reservoir is actually 35-gallon barrels on their sides and plumbed together at the bungs. I cut holes in the sides (now the top) of the barrels and inserted the drain pipe. When I filled in the bed, the soil went down into the drain pipes to act as wicks. The reservoir fills from one end and overflows into the next bed, which I built about 4 inches lower than the first bed. As previously mentioned, these beds are plumbed into the overflow on my rain barrels. I initially filled them from the hose but I have never needed to add more water in the last 4 years. That includes the awful drought we had here in Kansas in 2012. Plants in these beds typically do better than my other beds. I think it is because they have all the water they want but their roots are not continually sitting in water. Plus the rainwater doesn't have chlorine, which I think makes a difference. While this system works great, if I were to build another bed I think I would dig the hole, line it with a pond liner, install short drain pipes vertically for the wicks, fill it with gravel (the bigger gravel size the better to increase the water volume), and use a landscape cloth, with holes for the wicks, to keep the soil out. It is just a simpler design plus I have had a trouble with tree roots invading these beds. A pond liner might keep them at bay.

I'd agree with making sure it's not too deep. I have them growing well in four different spots. I lost one once when it was covered with way too many leaves over the winter. :-(. Unfortunately, it was a huge beautiful plant that I'd decided to move before I smothered the poor thing. I have one growing in lots of shade and where it's fairly dry too, and even that's doing OK. But it's not light fluffy soil, either.

9+ years on F&P Intuitive (same basic design as yours...just more options) and not a whiff of anything nasty or moldy to be found. I do NOT run exclusively cold, which I have always found to be a bad idea. Also, I do occasionally use LFS (depends on the items being washed). However, I wash colds on cold, items recommended for warm on warm, whites and cleaning rags on hot, etc. I also run the recommended cleaning cycle 4 times per year (every season), with one of them (once per year) being exclusively hot water and lots of vinegar (i.e. no detergent). This not only cleans, sanitizes and deodorizes, but also removes every last speck of detergent reside too. The tub looks like new afterwards! The washer has been great and cleans very well, but every machine requires maintenance of some kind. If you never take care of it you will pay the price afterwards (if it were topic-appropriate, I'd tell the story of someone I know who never bothered to do any maintenance of any kind on their car...big mistake!).

Hi Val, I am a relative newbie to containers also, always had an inground garden. When we moved here five years ago I started an inground garden and I believe the manure I worked into the soil was contaminated with an herbicide or the previous owners were fastidious about a perfect lawn? Either way, all the tomatoes I planted failed that year with obvious herbicide damage. Plus we have horrible soil here, pure clay. So I jumped into container growing pretty quickly so I could have tomatoes and I have learned something new every year. I was intimidated by a drip system also, But discovered it is really easy to set up. Everything is available at Lowes or HD in the plumbing section, they even have kits. Or online. At the spigot you attach a timer, backflow preventor, (fliter and pressure regulator are recommended also but I skipped those as my spigot is at almost ground level and there wasn't room) and an adaptor to allow a 1/2" poly tubing to be attached. (All these parts are labeled at the store) Run the tubing behind your pots and then use this little part that crimps the tubing at the end. Get the tool to poke a hole in the tubing. Then you stick in a little fitting that allows you to attach 1/4" tubing that will run to one pot. Do this for each pot. Attach your emitter at the end of the 1/4" tubing. You can see above in this thread the microsprinklers I used and the stakes they go on. (But there are alot more types of emitters available, I just really liked those) It is really that simple and only took me a few hours to set this up. There are a ton of utube videos and websites that have illustrations that help visualize this set up. You can do this girl! (or guy? sorry) Oh and the cages are Texas Tomato Cages that I bought 10 or 12 years ago on the internet. Jennie