Water works

 I love to grow veg in the poly tunnel and I love my garden but one part I really don't like is watering things. I forget, or my knees hurt, or I get distracted. I am terrible at remembering to do it consistently and unfortunately consistency is the key to successful veg growing.

Watching a section on Gardener's World about an allotment for a guy who is frequently away for periods during the growing season, I was interested in his 'self-watering' planters, or Wicking Pots. This is a system involving a reservoir of water, a wick to draw the water up, and the pot itself. There are absolutely heaps of items you can buy from the basic to the very high tech, but the principle is largely the same.

Our garden tends to the 'allotment chic' aesthetic rather than gadgetry. It felt much more fun to work out how to make them myself than to buy a system so I headed to Google to look at ways of making some wicking pots myself.

THE TRIAL

On the advice of some very helpful YouTube channels, we bought generic builders buckets from Wickes for a quid a go. These would be our resevoirs.

Reusing large plastic pots from shrubs we'd bought in the past would be fine for my cucumber and tomato plants. To hold up the pots I put upturned ice cream tubs in the buckets. This holds the pot proud of the bucket, creating more space for the reservoir.  I cut openings in the sides to let the water in, and in the top to allow air to escape as I pour water in.

As for wicks,  I took the worst of our old tea towels and a sweatshirt B has outgrown. I cut them into strips and pushed the ends through the holes in the base of each pot, long enough to dangle over the ice cream tub to the bottom of the bucket. 

There are loads of different ways to lay out the wicking systems. I made three different ones so I can monitor the results and see which (if any!) is effective.

1) Four thick twisted sections of sweatshirt fabric running all the way up the sides of the pot and held in place by clothes pegs, with a piece of fabric across the bottom of the pot to stop any soil falling into the reservoir. 

2) Several short wicks leading to a thick layer of fabric in the base of the pot to water it from below only.

3) Loads of short croquet-hoop style wicks made from tea towels, both ends trailing to the resevoir and fiilling every one of the holes in the pot - a little but everywhere approach

You can see approaches 1 and 3 - I forgot to photograph the base layer type.

Next job was to fill the pots with peat free compost and plant the tomato and cucumber seedlings. I put in a cane to tie them to as they grew. The pot then went into the bucket - making sure the fabric wicks were hanging down to touch the bottom of the bucket - to sit securely on top of the ice cream tubs. Mark carried them into the poly tunnel for me and I filled the resevoirs from the water butt.

I found the top of the soil felt slightly damp for about 4 days - 5 if it was cooler out. This was great for my erratic watering; even more so later in the summer, when I once again tore the meniscus in my right knee and mobility became a bigger issue for me.  It was also great because our 8 days in Portugal meant my Very Excellent Mate Penny only had to pop over twice to water them.

The gorgeousness of Portugal

Truly fantastic holiday- and yes, you can read in a pool

RESULTS

Good things - 

• stayed moist
• needed little attention
• plants survived heat waves and absences

Bad things - 

• the insects! something clearly lay its eggs in the stagnant water at the bottom of the resevoirs
• the smell when watering - disturbing the stagnant bit not only led to a swarm of flies but also a horrible stink
• instability - the pots listed somewhat over the course of the summer so the plants grew at some inconvenient angles. I could pop a bit of stone or brick to wedge them upright in future

Learning points - 

• FEED THE PLANTS.  I always used growbags with added fertiliser incorporated so it didn't occur to me I needed to regularly feed the plants. What can I say, I'm a twit.
• put less water in the resevoir each time unless I was going away. By leaving so much standing water in the reservoir (because I thought the plants would be more thirsty than they were at the start) I ended up with the bugs/pong situation
• wedge them in place so they don't tip to the side

I will definitely do it again. There was no observable difference in the growth of the plants or the effectiveness of the wicking systems whether tea towel, sweatshirt, long wicks, short wicks and croquet hoops, so that makes things easy. The wicks aren't reusable as the cotton is pretty disgusting after one season, but we always have some old rags, t-shirts or cloths around.

For a number of reasons we didn't have a successful tomato crop - the scary 40 degree temperatures stressed everything, the plants fruited late and didn't have time to ripen, and yes, for those on the back, I totally failed to regularly feed the poor things.

On the positive side, lots of green tomatoes means lots of green tomato chutney.

Green Tomato Chutney

• 500g unripe tomatoes
• 500g onions
• 250g sultanas (or 125g plus 125g diced Bramley
• 200g brown sugar
• 1.5tsp salt
• 1tsp cayenne pepper
• 1tsp crushed cardamom seeds
• 1tsp mustard seeds
• 500ml vinegar - whatever type you have

Chop the tomatoes and onions, chuck everything into a pot and simmer uncovered for 45-75 minutes, depending how finely you diced things. When it's nice and reduced, put the hot churney into sterilised jars.

Ta-Da!

Getting my head straight, getting my home straight

As anyone who has ever been to our house will no doubt be aware*, I hate housework.

Not just dislike, actively loathe. 

I'm frequently happy as a clam cooking, baking, preserving, sowing, potting on, pruning... I even quite like pegging the washing out. Repairing a tear or sewing a button on is pretty satisfying too. But tidying and cleaning? I'd rather have dentistry.

Even Gonzo's complaining about the mess

A more recent impediment has been the short period of activity I can manage before I 'run out of knees'. If I've only got a good active 45 minutes I'll be damned if I'll spend it cleaning the kitchen when I could be in the garden or making a curry. 

With Mark working full time, the lads with their stuff and B at school, this leads to the place becoming a bit of a tip. I'm the one with the time to tackle it and I don't or won't or can't. It becomes a vicious circle - the worse it gets, the more is required to put it right, and the more anxious and stressed about tackling it I get, so I put it off.

I was lying in bed this morning doing my physio exercises and feeling very fed up with the state of the bedroom and bathroom, hacked off with my pain levels and pretty pissed off with my lack of motivation. 

The bathroom didn't just need a quick clean, it needs the steam mop on the tiles and grouting. The bedroom won't just improve with a quick tidy up, I need to sort out the massive stacks of clutter on every horizonal surface (except the bed - that just had the cat and me). After I washed the sheer curtains last summer I broke the wire and never rehung them, so that needs doing too. And the windows need a clean.

My instinct with each of these was to tell myself it's all awful, I'm a horrible lazy slob and to walk away and close the door on it all until one day I can't stand it anymore and burn it down actually get stuck into cleaning.

Then I stopped myself. I've done enough CBT to not get into this sort of unhelpful churning, for god's sake, so why wasn't I using it?

As Voltaire tells us, 'best' is the enemy of 'good'. I am a very thorough person by nature, but that's a stumbling block here. OK, I can't spend two hours with the steam cleaner on all the tiling. What if I didn't tackle the tiles and the grouting, but did clean the sink, toilet, mirror and shower screen and stopped? No, I wouldn't have a glistening lovely bathroom, but I would have one much nicer than now.

A good 80% of the clutter in the bedroom is books I can't currently put away. If I'm not up to (yet another) big book cull, what could I improve in 5 minutes? Simply putting the travelling bag away, removing clothes from the chaise longue, making the bed, collecting the laundry into one place made the room less of a disgrace. 

I had internalised that if I wasn't doing cleaning 'properly', it wasn't worth doing. That's nonsense. It's not a binary of acceptable and unacceptable. There's a sliding scale from Show Home to Shit Tip and a nudge in the right direction is a good thing.

It's simple, it's obvious but I couldn't see it.  I don't have to do everything thoroughly or not at all. Similarly, I don't have to commit to 'little and often' as a permanent approach. I've been an All Or Nothing person my whole life, it's not likely to change now. But I can just decide "I would feel better if I spent 5 minutes on that job" and do it, without pressuring myself to do the next bit and the next. And without walking away from it all because it's too much.

One day there might be a utopia in which I can make my friends' dinners and they do my cleaning - or I work out how to monetise my disparate skills and earn enough to employ a cleaner. But until then, doing a bit when I can is better than my current approach. 

I generally write things down here when I think I'll need to come back to them. (This is usually recipe or garden related!) I know my housekeeping debacles are a recurring theme, so I'm going to need reminding of all this. Type it out, find the right words, rewrite a bit until I make sense to myself and POW the muddle of emotions and anxieties in my head becomes something I have Thought Through (another favourite thing of mine) and no longer has to power to stress me.

Words make things so much better.

*I once had a friend who used to come around frequently tell me "If my house was like this I would never invite anyone over." She did have a cleaner 3 times a week though.