Making and using self-watering pots for growing fruit & veg

[UK-with-kids]

I recently heard about the idea of self-watering pots that have a water reservoir in the bottom as a way to give my plants a constant level of moisture when I forget to water them or I'm away from home. There are a lot of YouTube videos on how to make these, but this one is really clear and only 4 minutes long:
https://youtu.be/3qlKw70-1XQ

After a bit of searching I found there was previously a post about this on the forum with a design, and Jacob even wrote an article on the blog (he was thinking about making 100 pots to bring in $2,000 of produce each year!):
viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3736&p=120217&hilit ... ng#p120217
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/conta ... -pots.html

I made my own version from the materials I had available as shown in the next post. It's been rainy and cool for the last couple of weeks since I made them so I haven't really been able to test out how effective they are. As I'm watering through a gap at the side rather than using a pipe I'm a bit worried about evaporation from below, and also whether any creatures like slugs and snails are going to hide in the cavity and come out and feast on young plants. On the positive side, with the outer container being translucent I can easily see the water level.

[UK-with-kids]

I have a free supply of these materials:



This is what my self-watering pot looks like before I put the soil in. I cut the top off the container at the rear of the first picture and put the bucket inside. I cut a hole in the bottom of the bucket and slipped a yoghurt pot down into it to act as the 'wick'. The other yoghurt pots are also underneath the bucket to support its weight. I made lots of holes in the yoghurt pots and the bottom of the bucket to help water wicking and drainage.



This is the finished assembled self-watering pot. The capacity of the inner bucket is about 13 litres (23 pints) of soil up to the brim, and the water reservoir holds at least 7 litres (12 pints). You can just make out the hole in the bottom right hand corner which is an overflow to prevent the water level getting too high and waterlogging the soil any higher up.

[UK-with-kids]

I was wondering if anybody had much experience of using these kinds of self-watering containers or if you guys have any tips? I have an ongoing free supply of the materials so I could make a lot of these if the design is good. I don't have any open land to grow in so self-watering pots are ideal for me at the moment.

[UK-with-kids]

So a couple of months later and the pots seem to have worked pretty well. I won't be able to compare properly until next year as I started with these quite late in the season. When I first used them it was really noticeable how lush and green the plants were compared to some of the others that I was growing in standard pots, especially when we went away and relied on a neighbour to do our watering. But that could also have been because the other plants had become older of course.

However, something strange has happened in the last couple of weeks. I have pots which in theory are identical, have the same soil, the same 3 bean plants, and were sown at the same time. Yet the one on the right in the picture below has started to really yellow and has far fewer beans on it. The only possibility I can imagine is that maybe I didn't make as many holes somewhere and it hasn't wicked as much moisture up. I'll be sure to check that out at the end of the season. Does anybody have any other ideas what could have caused it?