Watering While Away - Just Add Wine

Keeping your plants 'hydrated' while you fly off to fun adventures is always a bit of a conundrum.
 Unless you have some form of automatic watering system in place, you must turn to begging or borrowing - especially when it comes to containers.

As I took stock a couple of weeks ago of the weather forecast, state my veggies were in, and length of my trip, I came upon a simple plan that seems to have work wonders.

I was only leaving for three days, and rain was possibly anticipated for the night of our return (you know how those meteorologist like to hedge). So I decided to front-load the water by giving everything a good thorough soaking the day before I left.  This would suffice for all the big half-barrels, but I worried more about some of the smaller pots.

I know that peppers can take some drought, and you even want to keep them a little underwatered in the case of hot peppers if you want to develop that heat. Ever wonder why some jalapenos are so much hotter than others? Usually its due to how they were watered. As the developing peppers are only the size of a baby's thumbnail right now, I took the chance to leave them be (after the good soaking of course).

For the leavy veggies, I was a little more concerned.  I knew that the window boxes of lettuce would wilt in 3 days for sure, leading to bitter, leathery leaves. Another compounding factor was their location - under the roof of the back deck - leaving all their water needs to me.  My other concern was my actively-growing lemon verbena. She is putting out such quantity of new growth that I new she'd dislike drying out.

So with all that said, I decided to give my lettuce & lemon verbena wine! With a plethora of wine bottles empty in the
recycling, I just filled three of them up and put one, upside-down, in each pot burring the neck.  It worked like a charm! They were empty when I got back, but all the plants seemed happy and ready to resume the normal course of
watering the next day.  For bigger pots, or longer away, you might consider placing 2 or more in each pot, if large enough to accommodate.

As a bonus, any rainwater that accumulates in the 'dimple' at the bottom of the upturned bottle provides a great little butterfly pond. They need water to you know, and the rim gives them a place to land to get a sip.  So not only are we watering the plants, but local insect-life too.