@DuaeGuttae ...I looked up a few videos on youtube...what is your favorite way to close the hole in the
bottom of the ollas? I'm absolutely gonna give these a try this summer... We honestly don't eat
a lot of veggies, but I really love to play in the dirt.
Maybe if you can get those raised beds to work, you’ll have some more veggies to eat. I just love fresh vegetables.
I actually don’t use pots with holes. Years ago when I started my raised bed project, I found great pots at Hobby Lobby that didn’t have drainage holes in the bottom. They were cheaper then, and I’d get them on half price sales. I also discovered that Hobby Lobby had lots of problems with them cracking or chipping in shipments, and people didn’t want to buy those for their floral arrangements for weddings or what have you. I’d talk to a manager and arrange to buy the lightly cracked or chipped ones for an additional discount off of the half price sales.
Get Terra Cotta Long Stem Flower Pot online or find other Containers products from HobbyLobby.com
www.hobbylobby.com
I don’t know if you have Hobby Lobby in your area, but it’s possible that other craft stores might have something similar. The key is to have unglazed terra cotta.
When my ollas have needed gluing, I have used original Gorilla Glue because it Is deemed food safe. I figured that anything in contact with the water that is nourishing my plants needed to be considered food safe. I’ve also used a silicone aquarium sealant to patch a huge terra cotta pot that cracked like a jigsaw puzzle during our 2021 single digit temperatures. If I were closing up a hole in the bottom of a pot, I think I’d just find some small tiles larger than the diameter of the circle and glue one over the top of the hole from the inside.
We have watering restrictions so often in the summers that I can’t hook up to our water service for watering my garden. If I could, I would have been tempted to do drip irrigation as
@NHWS mentions. I believe that’s what
@begreen runs in his raised beds as well.
Ollas are super-cool, though, and I find it especially fascinating how the roots of the plant will grow right around the pot. Sometimes they attach so tightly that it can even be hard for me to remove the ollas even much later when the plant is no longer there.
I do think you should work to address why your raised beds aren’t holding water. I know you used the “Mel’s Mix” formula from Square Foot Gardening. There are forums about that, and some people do have trouble with the formula. Here’s an example of a thread about such problems.
I just harvested two boxes worth of carrots, onions, cauliflower, cabbage, lettuce, and broccoli. Some of these performed very well, others not so well. I explored the soil and found that it was generally dry, especially in the 12 inch carrot box. I've been watering liberally twice a day. I...
www.houzz.com
One thing I have done to increase the moisture holding abilities of my raised beds is to incorporate some clay into my homemade compost. As NHWS points out, you really don’t want to go too far with that, but it sounds like you don’t have any waterlogging problems. I use bags of cheap unscented cat little from our local grocery that are a mixture of zeolite and bentonite granules, and it works great to give a little extra moisture retention for me. You could probably pretty easily find pure bentonite cat litter and try incorporating a little bit at a time into your beds to see if it helps.
Peat moss can become hydrophobic when it dries out completely. If your beds have lots of peat, I’ve heard that people sometimes add a tiny bit of dish soap to a handheld sprayer and saturate the beds with that before a good rain, and it helps the beds not to shed the rainwater.
I’m sorry if this is a data dump. I’m rushing to finish as my husband just prepared a lunch for us and has rung the dinner bell.
, so I want one that gives me a higher reach and more support.
