Container gardening can be both beneficial and detrimental to the plant, depending on many factors. You can control the soil environment with ease, but the roots can still experience issues. They can become either too dry, or too wet depending on your watering habits. For perfect balance, you can rely on self-watering planters. These offer an alternative watering technique that has a number of benefits. The soil in self-watering planters perches above a base water reservoir where the roots can stretch down for nourishment. If you’re wondering in what ways will that benefit your plants, keep reading.
Retaining Nutrients
When watering a plant in a traditional container garden, the soil nutrients slowly diffuse out of the container together with the water molecules. In order to keep the soil’s nutrients level steady you will have to add organic matter in previously determined periods of time. What makes self-watering planters the better option is the closed system underneath which allows the nutrients to be kept in immediate surroundings – ready to be used by the plant whenever it may need them. Simply put, the necessary nutrients are not lost through drain holes, and in time you will see that your plants thriving beautifully.
Saving Time
When you are out of town or you work long hours, your plant can feel your absence by drying out because of lack of water. When using a traditional container, you need to regularly check the soil’s moisture and be careful regarding when and how much you water for best-growing results. Self-watering planters, on the other hand, can give you a peace of mind to travel, work and enjoy other activities that will occupy you for days without harming the plants whatsoever. Besides these, there are also DIY options of self-watering planters, but people who DIY their own planters recall wasting a lot of precious time without any real results. Instead, had they opted to not DIY their own planters, but rather get one that has a special system integrated, they would have seen better results. With these planters, the plants can go several days without any watering action from you, they will completely rely on the watering system the planter comes with.
Saving Water
Gardeners that live in dry climates often face the issue of conserving water. Self-watering planters only evaporate some of the water from the soil, and this usually happens after direct watering from above. The water in the underneath system can’t evaporate due to the dense soil that is covering it. So, the plant has a reliable water source at all times. Plus, the amount of water wasted on watering routines is much lower. And all this low water consumption is not harmful to the plant, on the contrary, the system maintains a healthy growing environment even for the most thirsty plants, like strawberries or dwarf fruit trees.
