Olla Update

As you all know, I put ollas in my garden this year around my tomatoes.  However, I made one crucial mistake.  I didn't allow enough room to get to them easily.  As the tomato plants grew bigger and bigger, it quickly became like crawling through a jungle when trying to get to the ollas to fill them with water and developed into quite the unpleasant chore. 

Since I was still harvesting tomatoes, up until last Friday, I have not yet dug them up to see if the roots of the plants had grown towards or around the ollas.  Unfortunately, they are now buried under all this snow and my tomato plants are  goners.  So when I am able, I will go out and dig them up and try to see how the roots were growing and try to get a few pictures for the blog.  You dont' even want to see my poor frozen tomato plants.

What I learned this summer was that if you make ollas out of clay pots like I did, it would be wise to to do a couple of things differently than what I did.  The first thing you could do would be to place them along the edge of your garden where they will remain easy to access for filling.   Don't bury them in between lots of plants that are going to get very big in a couple of months.

The second thing you could try is to enlarge the hole on the top pot and install a piece of PVC pipe up to a height that would be easy to fill.  Not sure on the specifics of this, but you could probably drill some holes in the part of the PVC pipe that will go down into the olla to allow the water to come out and fill the olla.  They you could just walk around and fill them from the top of the PVC pipe.  Of course, I have not tried this yet, so it is all theory at this point.

The third thing you could do is to purchase ready made ollas that have the the tall spout on the top that sticks up out of the ground making them easier to fill.  This is really the only problem I have found with using the clay pots.  Since they are flat and at just about at ground level when buried, you have figure out a way to fill them easily.   Each year is a learning experience and eventually I will get this down pat.  If anyone out there has any ideas or knowledge about watering with ollas, I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences or ideas.

In addition to the above mentioned improvements, I also plan to try them in some raised bed gardens.  I have decided that raised beds and container gardens will replace my in the ground gardens as I did not enjoy crawling on my hands and knees through the tomato plants with a hose to fill the ollas.  Plus they are just so hard to work in with all the bending, stooping, kneeling and digging there is to do.   There has to be an easier way and I am going to find it!

But using smaller, raised beds, I may be able to keep the ollas at the perimeter of the raised bed, thereby making filling them much easier.  Or at the very least, eliminating the crawling on my hands and knees part. It would not have been so bad getting between the tomato plants had I not had to get on my hands and knees to do it.

I feel that gardening should be an enjoyable past time.  While it is hard work and challenging at times, why not incorporate things that make it easier and more pleasant, like raised beds.  I will be making mine tall enough that I can sit on the edge of them and do my gardening chores either standing or sitting.  I think that will make gardening much more enjoyable and much less of a chore and perhaps some water saving methods, such as ollas, will be easier to incorporate into raised bed gardens than they are into the ground.

One thing I will report is that I was shocked at how often the ollas went dry.  I was filling them daily until the last 6 weeks or so when I gave up and just watered the tomatoes normally.  So I feel that they must have been doing their job superbly.  The water was definitely seeping out and I am pretty sure I am going to find lots of tomato plant roots around each one once I can get to them.

All in all I would say that my olla experiment was a success and with some tweaking next year, I think it can be even a greater success.  I will also work on some posts on raised bed, container and window box gardening in the near future.