by Nebula Haze
Oh no! You just realized you need to be away from your cannabis plants for an unexpected trip or vacation. How will you water your plants while you’re gone?
Don’t worry, you have two reliable automated watering options that will deliver water to your plants while you’re away.
- Clay watering stakes – these use a passive wicking system to deliver water to your plants via gravity, tubing, and clay stakes.
- Automated watering via a water pump on a timer – this involves using a specially made pump plus tubing to deliver water to your plants on a timer. Kind of like your own personal sprinkler system to water plants on a schedule.
Clay Watering Stakes
The most common way to auto-water your plants is using clay stakes. When set up properly, these stakes slowly provide water as the substrate dries out. I’ve used the Blumat brand, which works great. There are also many generic versions that are cheaper and likely work just as well (but I haven’t personally tried yet).
One way to automatically water plants is with Blumat clay stakes connected to your water container via a tube
Soak the stakes then stick them right into your plant container
The stakes are connected to tubes that are placed in your water container
Water is automatically pulled from your container as the grow medium dries. Raise the water container to increase the overall wetness, and lower it to reduce the moisture. I’ve successfully used these to keep plants watered when I need to leave the house for a few days.
You can get just the stakes and tubes, as pictured above. You can also get a more complete system that includes the reservoir and allows you to split the water between multiple plants while only needing one main tube.
The “Blumat Drip System” is a complete gravity-based autowatering system. It can be confusing because it uses the term “drip” but this is actually a passive/gravity watering system like the stakes, just provided in a way so you can easily use the system on many plants instead of having to give each plant its own line to the reservoir of water.
However, they are not precise since they rely on a mixture of gravity and wicking action. That means clay stakes are less effective over long periods of time compared to a system that waters your plants with a pump on a timer.
Automatic Watering System with Water Pump / Automatic Drip Irrigation Kit (pump water to plants on a timer)
The other main automatic watering option for cannabis plants is using “drip irrigation” or automatic watering system that pumps water to plants on a timer. In this setup, water is dripped directly to the base of plants. Kind of like giving each plant its own personal sprinkling system. These do take some monitoring since your plants use more water as they grow and you’ll occasionally need to adjust the timer to give more or less water at a time, and of course plants eventually use all the water and you’ll need to refill the water reservoir, but these can easily be used to water your plants for a week at a time or even longer. Set them up to keep the plants a bit on the wet side, and as they drink more they will still have enough for a while.
These can also be used on a more permanent basis because once this is set up, all you have to do is refill your main water container and watch plants for signs they need more or less water so you can adjust the timer if necessary.
Basically set up plastic tubing with stakes to deliver water to all your plants like this.
Attach the tubing to an auto-watering pump with a water reservoir. This is a 5-gallon water jug meant for drinking water that contains nutrient water for my cannabis plants. You can see I just put the auto-watering pump on top with a tub going into the water, and the other side of the tubing leads into the tent.
I cover the reservoir with a thick blanket to prevent any light from getting to the nutrient water because light encourages bad things to grow. Then set the timer to water your plants. Each pump will provide water at a different rate, and the water will be split between all your plants, so it’ll take a little fiddling to get it exactly right. I was able to water these plants properly by setting this pump to water twice a day for 60 seconds. However, I have a different pump that provides water much faster and I found I had to set that one up in a similar tent only watering for 40 seconds twice a day. That’s why it’s always important to monitor the plants for at least a day or two before leaving them alone for a week.
