Stacking The Boxes of the Cistern Bed Garden Design

The liner of the reservoir box is installed and the garden bed box is placed on top. Some finishing touches on the construction are made before the bed is filled with Mel's Mix. ( see http://www.squarefootgardening.com ).

Transcript:

Alrighty then. We have got this liner all stapled in with staples. It should hold the water just fine. It is all one piece. See it would have been a lot easier if I had just one plastic feeding trough. If they even made them like this size. I would rather use a feeding trough than to make this but I have never seen a feeding trough that will be plastic and serve as my wicking well; my water reservoir.

0:35
So here is the top. It is going to have the black plastic on the underside. It has been glued on. I used contact cement for that. For the top I used some kind of all purpose cement. I do not think I will try it again because it was kind of difficult.

0:55
I will just go ahead and maneuver that back on into position so that it will look like that. (The other 4'x8' garden that is.) Give her a try. It would be nice if some manufacturer would have all of this done for me already and I could just buy something like this. It would be a lot easier. A lot nicer. Some things you just have to make for yourself.

2:30
OK. Everything is into position. The next item on the agenda is to place this fabric over there. You may have noticed that not only are there big holes that are drilled into this top piece that I am going to be using as the bed. There is just big holes and about every six inches I put little holes for things like drainage into the water reservoir and also some way of getting air into the root systems and stuff like that. They always tell you that is a good idea. So hopefully that will help this without making it too weak. As you can see I have got this nice, solid, center two by four. That is an important piece that I failed to put into this other garden over here. I will likely have to go back and redo that garden and put this in. Because when you do this eight foot long bed like this that is a lot of weight with the water in there. It needs all the support it can get. My other garden over there is sagging a bit. This liner here is just to keep the soil from dropping down into the water reservoir. So I come over here and I cover up those holes and I staple.

5:10
So there you have that. Pretty simple. Now all of those holes what I will do is make a cross in them. Just the ones where the wicks will go. The two-liter bottle wicks.

6:25
So that is all of that. As I said earlier I prepared these two-liter bottles and put a little fabric into the bottom of them. Plunge them down into the holes where they go.

8:25
I will use my knife here to trim them a little bit more flush.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• square foot garden
• bed garden
• Cistern Garden
• water reservoir
• wicking well