 We started our community garden over in Almas Park Terrace a couple years ago as we're working on our second year now and part of the grant we got through Greenspaces Alliance was when we do it, most of our garden is kind of these four by four individual plots. Because of that we have individual plots. We wanted a way where people could maintain their garden that was relatively easy without having to water every day or worry about things. And we kind of stumbled upon this idea and it's really worked out nicely. And so through Greenspaces we got a grant to buy clay and we have a number of potters in the neighborhood by just pure luck. And so we all met one weekend and made all the oyas and then we've been using them in our plots now for two years and it was a lifesaver in our first year to have it being last year which was the worst drought on record. And so we actually had a pretty productive garden using those oyas and at the heat of the drought last summer, you know, 100 degree days over and over and over, I really only had to go out to the plot and fill it up twice a week. So fill up the water twice a week and it survived. This year everybody kind of has bought into it and we believe it and so we're just filling up the oyas and it's working out nicely. I didn't invent this technology, nobody invented this technology. This is like a 2,000 year old technology that was happening in North Africa which you can imagine this is desert-y, very important and then also in China so kind of independently. It requires a ceramic pot that's been fired but it's not been fired to a temperature where the clay is not porous anymore so the clay is still porous here. We bury it in the ground up to its neck, plant plants around it, fill it up with water and then this lid just sits on here to prevent evaporation and mosquitoes from growing. And what happens is the plant roots start to grow up against the oyas and they pull the moisture out of the oyas and they only use the water that they need. And so there's been studies done and the plants actually require 70% less water than traditional irrigation methods because you lose so much of that water through evaporation or runoff or whatever. So this is probably the most efficient way to water your plants and that's really important in South Texas now that we're kind of in drought country. So there's another technique I can show though that doesn't require you to be a potter to make it. You can just take a couple of terracotta planters that you can buy even for a dollar at the dollar store as long as you take a broken piece and glue it on the inside to seal up the bottom hole. And what I use is a clear silicone gel because it always stays flexible. So I'll just do a little bit on the broken pottery, stick it in the hole and then I'll go ahead and put glue on the rim and glue them together rim to rim. Same thing, then we bury them in the ground up to here, fill that full of water, place the plants around it and the plants will grow and pull the moisture out of the pot. I want to talk about the advantages of this. First thing is it's good for the soil structure. If you take plants in the traditional way and you're watering all the time, it's compacting that soil down more and more and more and it doesn't let air get through it and all that problem. So now we're putting water directly below the surface and so the soil can stay light and airy. The other really cool advantage of this technique is especially like last summer when we got no rain, no weed seeds on the surface were able to germinate because there's no water. And so the water is directly underneath with the roots of the plant that you want to happen and so there's less weeds at the surface because of that. I think that's really cool. We still mulch. So we've mulched all around and that helps keep everything in but we're not allowing any weeds to germinate. It inherently checks against over irrigation. I guarantee right now the oils I have in my pot, they're probably more full of water than they were last week because of that great rain we got. So the water from the soil if it's saturated is going to seep into the pot and vice versa. And the roots of the pot through evaporation they're only going to pull the water they need. There's a professor that did it, I guess someone did the doctorate thesis in Africa about the oil system and they scientifically measured everything and it ends up that most plants use about 70% less water with the same yield than any other traditional technique. And I think that's pretty, for us, for South Texas, that's huge. And then fertilizer, I just went, I just got through planting artichokes and they require a lot of fertilizer, a lot of water and so we're using liquid fertilizer and you use about 25% of the amount that's normally recommended and I just pour the liquid fertilizer in the oil, fill it up with water and then it will slowly get directly to the root. So I'm using a lot less fertilizer than you might normally need to. Or like compost tea, if you're making compost tea you can just pour that directly into your oil. Now these pots they do have a little bit of maintenance issues. Think of because our water is so limey, if we allow it to get dry out of multiple times then eventually that lime is going to kind of cause a little crustacean, it's going to fill all the pores in the clay. So there's a couple things you can do if that doesn't happen. You can just kind of fill up a tub of water, maybe dump in a gallon of vinegar and let it soak overnight. It'll dissolve that calcium back out of the clay. You can also put it back in the kiln and fire it off again and that will burn out the calcium. So there's a couple of ways you can fix that. You can prevent it from happening completely by just always making sure there's water in there. So once a week you fill up with water, as long as there's always water it's always moving out then it never has a chance to solidify. Okay so we're going to place this in a way we're thinking about the surface that the poorest part is buried underneath. It's good to go ahead and leave this up a little bit because that way dirt and stuff won't fall into it, which isn't a big deal you can clean it out but that just kind of prevents that. And so then if you had let's say you have new plants then what you do is just sort of start filling this in, oh I'm a potter, okay. And then like you take your plant out of the seedling and then you can just plant it right here right up kind of against the pot and you can put four in, right. And then just continue to fill this in, okay. So we fill this full water, you know we had plants around it and just keep the lid on it and then maybe check it twice a week and it's ready to go.