North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Ginda Fisher <list@ginda.us>]

How often do you water your container plants?  Anything more often than once 
a week is probably a non-starter for me.  (I do keep some tomatoes in large 
pots, and they may get watered twice a week during summers' peak.  But then I 
go away for vacation for a week, and pray for enough rain that they don't die 
outright.  I'm typically away for 2 one-week stretches during mid-summer.)

Ginda

On Dec 12, 2010, at 9:55 AM, mIEKAL aND wrote:

> I keep a couple Meyer's lemons & various other citrus, figs, bananas, etc 
> in containers. I've found that a great way to stabilize the watering in the 
> summer is to use oversized plastic saucers beneath all of my collection.  I 
> get the plastic saucers from the local Menards & the cost does add up if 
> you have a couple 100 plants, but easily worth the price.  Bottom watering 
> has several advantages but the main one seems to be that on really hot 
> periods of weather it gives me a one or 2 day buffer in case I'm away & 
> don't get to watering everything.  The other feature I like is the top of 
> the plant actually gets fairly dried out when one bottom waters & slows 
> down the growth of the miscellaneous weeks that pop up.
> 
> ~mIEKAL
> 
> 
> GINDA wrote:
> 
>> By the way, people sometimes as why I don't just leave it in the pot over 
>> the
>> summer, outdoors.  The
>> 
>> answer is that I cannot water it reliably enough to keep it alive in a pot 
>> in
>> the sun.  But it doesn't really need all that much water, so it does fine
>> planted in the ground.  Even during droughts, I rarely water it.