How to Keep Your Plants Alive While Away on Vacation

Have you ever wondered how to keep your plants alive while your away on vacation? Me too!!! I searched high and low and found this method. I wasn't sure it would work, but it did. Insert happy dance here. Plants and flowers for some reason make me happy:) I really enjoy them and when my husband decided on a vacation this summer I thought how in world am I going to keep my flower baskets watered? I was seriously about to buy one of those shirts that say "I can't go....My plants need me."

So here it is.

• You'll need a big container (I used the largest kitchen pot)
• Twine 
• Scissors to cut the twine
• Screwdriver, optional. I used it to poke a hole into the soil where I put the twine into.

So, I think the pictures make it pretty self explanatory. Fill a large container to the brim with water, soak the twine in the water until thoroughly wet, then put one piece of the twine in the pot and another end into the soil. Space out the twine so equal parts of the plant will get watered. I was gone 10 days and noticed that a little bit on the end of one plant got a tinge of yellow (meaning that part got over watered). I never imagined it would get over watered.

It was really hard to get a good shot of the plants in my tiny bathroom. But this should give you an idea since you'll have a different size of plants than I have anyways. I have flower planters that hang over my deck railing. I wanted to originally put them in the bathtub to create less mess but they needed something to support them from falling over.....so the bathtub was a fail. I then thought I might be able to put each one in front of each sink and (the faucet would be the brace) to keep them from falling over. Bingo bongo! Then, I need something to elevate my pot of water. The pot needs to be elevated to wick the water down through the twine. I used my 4 year old's step stool but needed more height so I got a skillet and put that under the pan. I also covered the stool with a towel since it was wood and she'd totally freak out if it got messed up.

Here you can see the water soaked twine that ran from the water pot to the plants. I put approximately 8-10 strands of twine for each plant and my planters are 3 feet wide.

I used a screwdriver to poke holes in the dirt and place the twine as far down as I could.  The roots is where the water needs to get to.

This is a close up of what my plants (coleus and sweet potato vines) looked after 10 days of the self watering system.

My pan of water was bone dry so I should have used a bigger pan but didn't have one. I'm not sure when the water ran out but do know it did a great job of keeping my plants alive while I was away. There was NO WAY they would have survived in the 106 degree temps we were having in Texas. I'm sure also the cooler temps inside also added to the survival but you can believe next time I go out of town, which is quite often this is the system I will use. Sometimes you just don't have someone to water the plants or want to bother them for that many days. This way the plants water themselves!!!