At Clean Air Gardening, we use many of the products that we sell at our own homes. (We can’t use everything at once though, because who has room for 600 plus products!)

We created the “Products We’re Using” section of the blog to give you a better idea of what these products are like when you get them home and start using them. We hope that you find these reviews useful and informative.

Today, I’m pleased to present a review of this self-watering planter. This planter is inexpensive, and is designed with a reservoir at the bottom that you fill up with water. The water then filters up through a wick to keep your plants properly watered.

I currently have three plants growing in three planters, a scented geranium, a rosemary plant, and a lavender plant. The scented geranium we keep indoors and the other two plants are outdoors.

We planted the scented geranium in the late winter when temperatures were still quite cool. I found that during this cooler season the soil actually stayed a little too wet with the reservoir and wick system. The geranium started to show a bit of stress and a few fungus gnats appeared.

For this time I started to water the plant without filling the resevoir to avoid this issue. However, as summer is now in full swing, the soil seems to stay at a good moisture level just by filling the reservoir. The one thing I’ve noticed is that the edges of the soil near the top don’t seem to keep very wet. This hasn’t been an issue as far as the health of the geranium but it may be for other plants.

In all honesty, the rosemary and lavender probably don’t need to be in self-watering planters because they are pretty low water use plants to begin with. However, in the time that we planted them, I think I’ve filled up the reservoir once. That’s like 5 weeks I believe. The self-watering container has turned these plants into the ultimate “plant it and forget it” system.

In summary, for the price, this is an excellent budget planter that can help you manage your time a little better and keep you from stressing out about your houseplants and outdoor plants when you go on vacation.

As I mentioned, you may need to monitor your plants during the cooler months and perhaps water in the traditional manner during the colder times of the year, but during the summer, the planter definitely works as advertised.

Please feel free to leave an additional comment about this product if you are using it yourself, or review it directly on the product page of the site.

Do you use a different Clean Air Gardening product that you would be interested in teaching others about?

Take some photos, write up your description and send it in, and we’ll publish it here if it’s useful.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 10:21 am and is filed under Products We're Using. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.