Balcony Garden Irrigation During Vacation

Everyone wants some ‘green’ in their home. Balcony gardens, terrace farming all are becoming more and more popular as we are realising importance of plants in removing pollution .

Later we will be following this up with how plants and trees would have helped in reducing the spread of pandemic .

Having a small balcony garden has it own pleasures and pains .The one which troubles people most is being able to take a vacation .

Watering plants regularly is a must for their health and in our hot summers plants won’t survive beyond  couple of  days without water. One can find ways to water plants up to 4-5 days using old bottles but what if we take a month long vacation ?

This is our way to use the water bottles we purchased for our previous vacations . We do travel a lot by road to places of pristine nature and getting clean drinking water  sometimes is a big problem.

All such bottles of water can be reused in many ways but we like them to be recycled in proper way cause they are in the 1% plastics that can be recycled. We have kept a few for our drip irrigation purpose. One bottle with this drip irrigation outlet joined by a good adhesive is pictured here. It has a regulator to maintain flow .

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A 5 litre bottle will have 50000 drops of 0.1 ml . 2 drops per minute means it will have 120 drops in an hour and at this rate can last up to 17 days but as the water height reduces in the bottle the rate too will slow down . This is due to less pressure of water column at the tap connection point. It may last for more than 20 days . Good time for a relaxed vacation . A medium sized potted plant can survive very well in this. A bigger 20 litre bottle can supply five such plants or a big plant for more than a month.

Just remember to remove these bottles from the sun and store the bottles in a dark corner of the house because sun makes the plastic brittle quickly and you would want this system to last for a very long time.

Happy Vacationing !!

Pushpaanjali

Nature Lover, Bangalore

Welcome! Fellow Green Living Enthusiast

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