Larger reservoir for self-watering pots

Today I tried out my idea for next years self-watering pots, using a polystyrene box as the reservoir. Over the year I have found that if I keep a pepper plant in a 10cm pot but give the roots access to water and nutes (nutrients), the plant can grow very large and produce a lot of peppers.

I did this my keeping the 10cm pot inside a plastic pint cup with a wick hanging down like this.

The reservoir can then be filled to about 1.5cm below the bottom of the pot. This is because the roots need access to air (oxygen) as well as water/nutes. If the cup was full up to the pot the peppers roots would rot.

On the whole this method has worked very well and I plan to keep a lot more plants in these pots next year. The only limitation of this method I found was the reservoir size - I had to refill the larger plants everyday. I had an aji lemon in a 10cm pot inside a 2litre bottle, it still needed refilling every 2-3 days, but it did get about 5 foot tall!

That's where the polyboxes come in. I have an almost limitless supply of these free from work. Holes in the lid can easily be cut for any size pot and they hold over 20litres of nutes.

Over winter the plastic pint cups will be fine, as the peppers will need far less water. So as a test I thought I would  plant some kale plugs I got in the garden centre for growing over winter.

I started by drawing round the top of the 10cm pot. Then I cut inside the outline so the pots wouldn't just fall through the holes. The beauty of using these boxes is how easy they are to cut, I just used a serrated steak knife to saw round inside the line.

I then cut some strips of capillary matting to use as wick.

I pulled the wicks through the bottom of the pots and filled with soil. I planted six kale plants in these pots and filled the reservoir with half strength growth fertilizer. This is just a test but if these kale does well I will probably put all my small pepper plants in pots like this.

Well that's a rap... I will leave you with a photo from my first ripe chinense of the year, My not so big,"Big sun habanero