Self-Watering Container from Recycled Materials

I was recently thinking about ways to decrease the expenses of indoor gardening as well as good ways to make use of products typically thrown away or recycled. One place to save a bit of cash for the penny pinchers among us is to make your own container from recycled products. I’ve been experimenting with several home made container types including my aero-crate, the 5-gallon self-watering container (link opens pdf), and hypertufa pots. Recently, I ran across an instructables article on using old soda bottles to make small, self-watering containers. Following this method, I recycled an old sock with a hole in it (because seriously… how else are you going to reuse such an item?), a 2L soda bottle, and a paper Trader Joe’s grocery bag. The sock acts as the water wick (making it “self-watering”), the soda bottle was cut in half and acts as the container/base, and part of the grocery bag was used between the base and the container to keep light from entering the container. In under half an hour, the container was made, filled with potting mix, and one of my loquat seedlings was planted in it, enjoying a ready supply of moisture in its new home. It has been a few days and the wicking really does seem to work rather well!  My one issue with this project is that with a 2 liter soda bottle, it only ends up holding a little under a quart of soil (a typical 1 gallon nursery pot holds about 3 quarts). I may try using different bottles (3-liters, milk jugs, anything else that looks interesting) to increase the volume of future iterations. For small seedlings or herbs/flowers, this would be a great little  project, especially for those who often forget to water (or over water and kill their plants).