Last season my partner and I made our first garden together. We had learned about self-watering plant containers and decided to build our own.
The self-watering part worked really well at first, but as the season went on, the water in the reservoir turned into a green sludge... ew! We weren't too sure about growing our vegetables in slime, but it was too late to turn back. We soon found out that the slime was the least of our garden's problems.... Mosquitoes began to grow in the water reservoir! Every time we went out to check on the plants we would get eaten alive! We read about putting cooking oil in the water, because it would supposedly make a film on top of the water and discourage the mosquitoes from laying their eggs. We tried it. But this is the South! The mosquitoes had a good old laugh about the oil and kept right on multiplying! All we could do was dump 'em out. So last year, 2011, our self-watering container garden grew 1 tomato, 4 really small bell peppers, 4 nice eggplants and a whole colony of mosquitoes! Then we gave up. Unlucky!
This year, we vowed to do better...
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