The Trials and Tribulations of Automated Watering

When I started to work on basement farming, or growing vegetables indoors, I started to discover regular analogies to the four ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water. It's easy to take the two or three of those for granted when you're farming outside, but indoors, where the environment is totally under your control (for better or worse!) understanding these elements takes on a whole new meaning. Of that, water has shown to be the trickiest element to master.

My parents were raised in the early part of the twentieth century in Nova Scotia, Canada. They learned to live off the land, growing as much as they could in their home gardens. Plumbing was a luxury, and outhouses where the norm. I guess that most of the garden watering was a manual effort when my parents where growing up.

When we moved to an old farmhouse on one acre of land on the south shore of Boston, my father starting growing a vegetable garden every year. I remember watching him as a little boy as he watered the garden when he got home from work. He would sit down in a lawn chair and used the hand spray to water the rows of vegetables twenty feet away.

In 2009, my son-in-law gave me an automated timer to water my outdoor garden. What a gift! Instead of manually turing the sprinkler off and on every day, the automated timer made the watering a "set and forget" issue. The batteries lasted for a season, and I quickly bought a second one for the front garden.

When I started growing indoors, I realized I needed to automate watering, but not sure where to start. I talked to a friend who set up automated watering. His advice was to focus on "Circular flow" or "loops" for water distribution, and not have a an end of the hose, and then do drips off the loop. He also pointed me to a hydroponic store in Sutton, MA. This store become a place I would visit often over the next few months.

I purchased half-inch main feed hose, a small immersible pump, some quarter-inch feed tubes, and an assortment of connectors. The basic design started with the pump located within a 5 gallon tank. a feeder pipe came out of the tank on a 1/2 inch main feed hose to the base of the "T" intersection. I would then run a loop around the other ends of the "T." the loop went around the outside of all the contianers. From that loop, I would connect 1/4 inch feeders that would cross over each of the containers. I punctured small holes into the feeders using small, finishing nails, punching though both sides of the feeder pipe. The water would drip out of these hoses and into the containers.

First attempt at automated watering

In theory, this sounds simple, but practicality reared its ugly head many times! I found that the tubs where sold in coils, so attempting to straighten them out was almost impossible! In my first attempt, I drilled holes into the outsid edges of the 2 foot planters, so the feeders were outside the planters, and kept the tubes in the right shape. That worked fine until I had to remove a planter, which required me to disconnect the feeder hoses. I found out that the more these hoses are changed, disconnected and reconnected, the greater the occurrence of leakage. I also discovered that I put too many holes into the tubes, and ended up putting finishing nails in the tubes to block the flow.
First attempt at indoor planting - also note the different container styles.

Second tubing attempt

The second attempt kept the loops separate from the containers, and I tied the hoses and feeders to the containers. This was an improvement, but it still took a lot of work to remove and replace planters. In the third attempt, I created a simple frame from 1x1 inch wood and angle connectors. I tied the hoses to the frame, and rested the frame over the outside edge of the planters. If I needed to move or change a planter, I just needed to move the frame out of the way. Success! I was able to easily working around the frame when I needed to do other tasks related to basement farming.

Wooden Frame used in watering

About this time, I decided to expand the indoor garden to a second tray containing 4 additional planting containers, doubling my basement farm. With one container, I had the water bucket located in the center of a tray. I needed to move the bucket to a place where water drains from both trays could be captured by the same bucket. That would allow me to use one water pump for both trays. I drilled holes in the front adjacent corners of the trays, and sealed the older hole with epoxy. I adjusted the trays so that each had a small incline with the hole in a lower cover by putting scrap wood under the opposite end, about a foot away from the opposite corner. Gravity would do the rest.

I went back to the local hardware store and picked up a cover for the 5 gallon pail. Vaporization was becoming a real issue, and covering the little reservoir will reduce evaporation. The holes I drilled were less than a half-inch wide, but to make sure the water falls into the bucket I needed to put funnels between the top of the bucket and tray. I took some gallon milk jugs and cut the top off near the handles, I drilled holes into the top of the cover, just enough to twist the top of the milk jug to make a tight fit. Since the milk jugs are square, the edges of the jug rested against the corner edges of the tray. I drilled two more holes, one for the pump hose (which cracked the cover, go figure), and a second to pour in water. For the last hole I used a sports bottle top to create a round funnel. I used the same hole to check the water level, and I used a gallon milk cap to cover the hole most of the time. If you examine a milk cap (and most caps of similar design) they have two ridges around the bottom of the cap to make the seal. I trimmed off the outer seal with a cardboard cutter to let it fit better inside the improvised funnel.

I also created a second tube framework for watering, using the same wooden frame design. In my first attempt in watering two frames concurrently, I found that the water flow was all going to one set of containers, and none was going to the second. the frame receiving all the water was a couple of inches below the other. This became a struggle for a few weeks, where I had o revert to manually watering the one which was high and dry. At a trip to the hydroponic store, I picked up some flow regulators. After many attempts to figure out how to use the regulators, I replaced the quarter inch hoses with holes that travelled through each container with two small hoses, one from each side of the loop that ended with the flow regulators which dripped slowly and regularly into the containers.

Flow Regulators

The flow regulators I used looked like two discs sandwiched together with small tubes coming out of each end. I learned through trial and error that the feed goes into the color side, and the output does out black side (see Photo). Each regular dripped up to 2 gallons per hour, different regulators have different colors and drip at different rates. I had the water pump on the same timer as the grow light, This was keeping the dirt moist, but not wet, through most of the day. This was good enough for the plants to grow steadily. After the light and water was running for a while, there was a small trickle of water back into the bucket after the pump was running for a while.

The 8 containers were at various levels of growth, different schedules of harvest, and different leafy vegetables. By December of 2010, The watering was now predictable and manageable. The pail was fastened to the tray support. While I checked the water leveling the pail every 1-2 days, I would add water 1-3 times a week. I dipped a dowel stick with gallon marks on its side to measure the water level. If the water level was under 3 gallons, I would use a two gallon watering pail to add water directly to the pail. In the middle of winter, I found the colder, and dryer the air, the more often I would need to add water. I was able to sustain this effort through the end of March when I broke down the system in a plan to start the spring transplants.


Overall, my first winter planting was successful, and I learned enough do plan a new approach for the following year. My immediate concern was the planning and planting for the seasonal outdoor garden.

Last picture of indoor farm before breaking it down for the season