Condo Gardening

Yesterday’s Declaration of Independence from Vegetable Gardening elicited some interesting responses from readers who have come to suspect the gardening bug is a disease, not an inspiration.  Two commenters, Carol and SherryH, describe their responses to the challenges of trying to maintain ornamental or vegetable container gardens in apartment-house conditions.

Boy, can I sympathize with their adventures! I also used to lug water out to a balcony (heh…once the downstairs neighbor was out there when I accidentally dumped too much on a big pot—the water overflowed and spilled off the balcony onto her noggin!).  The same issue—lugging heavy, sloppy containers of water—arises when you decide nothing will do but you must decorate your home with a forest of ficus, potted palms, pothos, creeping Charley, begonias, purple plants, spider plants, and Christmas cactus, with a few orchids thrown in for good measure.

Contemplating Carol’s strategy (get rid of the darned plants once and for all) and Sherry’s decision (keep gardening, but the stuff all has to be edible) reminded me of indoor garden hoses I used to see advertised occasionally when stacks of catalogues would arrive in the mail. The idea is that you’ll attach the hose to your kitchen or bathroom sink faucet and then all you have to drag is a hose with a shut-off sprinkler on the end. Did a little search, and lo! They still exist, and Amazon carries them! By golly, just look at that happy plant lover in the picture.

Some of the reviewers seem less than euphoric, though. As it develops, to make this gadget work you need to get an adapter. Claber makes a connector for indoor hoses, but apparently you need to be sure it actually will fit one of the fixtures in your house. Read the reviews by way of figuring that out. 

There’s also an indoor plant watering kit, which seems to be better received by reviewers. It has one of those coil hoses, allegedly forty feet long, and it includes a sprinkling wand.

If wrestling a hose on and off your kitchen faucet looks like more trouble than it’s worth, Claber makes a gadget that pumps water from a reservoir through a drip system for plants. It doesn’t obviate the problem of having to haul water, but at least it might cut down the number of watering expeditions to once every week or two.

Then there’s this doo-dad: the Plant Sitter automatic watering sensor. Looks like you attach it to a bottle of water and let it osmose (is there such a word?) into the plants for a week or so at a time. If you got some of the kind of decorative plastic bottles that come from overpriced water vendors and if your plants were pretty bushy so they’d hide the plasticware, these could reduce the hauling quotient, too. Note one reviewer says that to make it work properly you not only have to fill the cone thingie with water, you also have to prime the hose by filling it with water, too. Hmmm…this thing looks pretty interesting. Around here, it sure could save a lot on water bills in the summer, if it works. 

I’ve tried these water globe things. They’re pretty, but they don’t work well, because they either dump all their water in one swell foop or the potting soil plugs them up. Ninety-one people have had better luck than I, so I must be doing something wrong. Evidently before you insert it in the soil, you have to have watered the plant well (kind of counterproductive, no?); this will prevent the thing from emptying immediately. Also it occurs to me that you could simply rubber-band or tie a little gauze or fine mesh over the nozzle end to prevent chunks of potting soil from plugging it. Even then, though, some reviewers found them problematic.

And finally, here’s another ingenious approach that could be useful: gel-packs that leach water into the plant’s soil.  This lash-up is supposed to last 30 days. In view of the one very powerfully negative review among a fistful of raves, I’d be sure to test this a long time before going on vacation—remembering that product reviews are now liberally laced with comments from paid shills. These days I take ecstatic exclamations of joy about a product with a large tablespoonful of salt. Could be worth trying, though.

Welp, it’s pretty clear from all these better mousetraps that we’re not alone in suspecting that under certain conditions gardening is more trouble than it’s worth. As for indoor gardening, I have a better plan: silk flowers!