He also gets rocks off of Craigslist. Lots and lots of rocks. Also sometimes cut stone blocks and bricks. He's been using them for hardscaping in the yard and garden. The rocks are often free. In the Hill Country there's so much limestone that people will post things to Craigslist like, "Big rocks free to anyone who wants to haul them away. Otherwise I'm crushing them into gravel and using them as fill." The cut stone blocks and bricks are usually leftovers from people's building projects. Sometimes people give them away for free, and sometimes they charge a small amount of money for them, but again it's still usually a fraction of the price you'd pay buying them retail.
Daniel built us a nice new raised flower bed in the front yard using cut stone blocks entirely off of Craigslist, and almost all of them were free. I think he paid $50 for one load of them. It replaced a dinky flower bed lined with very rotten landscape timbers that was there when we moved in. This stone one he built will probably still be there after we're both dead.
The downside of his Craigslist addiction is that sometimes he'll get things that he's not even sure what we can use them for, but he had to get them because they were such a good deal. The back yard is becoming full of rocks and a big stack of bricks that we're going to use for something someday, and he just got this nice wooden cabinet that's in our storage unit because we're going to put it somewhere someday but we're just not sure where yet. But it was free, so he had to get it!
I try to stay away from Craigslist because I don't want to get addicted too, but a couple of years ago I lucked out and got a really great deal on something that's made a big difference in how I garden.
Daniel found a post where people were giving away cut limestone edging stones that would be nice to line garden beds with. It turns out they were dismantling a community garden at a trailer park, and I noticed that in the picture of the stones they posted, there were also ollas laying around, even though the post itself didn't mention the ollas. I had heard of ollas before and even seen them for sale in a few garden centers, but the two gallon ones cost something like $35 - $40 each. They didn't seem economical for a garden as big as mine. We emailed the guy asking if he was getting rid of the ollas too, and he agreed to throw in the ollas for an additional $200. When we got there to pick them up, a lot of the ollas were broken, but we managed to get 40 ollas that were either completely in tact, or only slightly damaged and able to be repaired. So that was $5 per olla. What a good deal!
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| Ollas sitting against the side of my house. |
What are Ollas?
Technically "olla" just means "pot" in Spanish. It can refer to pots used to cook beans in, for example. But the ollas I got off Craigslist are the kind used to water plants. They're made of porous terra cotta and are kind of gourd shaped with a lid on top. You bury them up to their necks and fill them with water, and the water slowly seeps out to water the plants around them.
Mine are the Dripping Springs Olla brand (which is why they say "DSO" on their lids), and hold about two gallons of water each. They're supposed to be big enough to water an area 4 feet in diameter. These ollas come from Dripping Springs, Texas, which is only about 30 miles from here, so that let me know that they can work in the clay and limestone soil of the Texas Hill Country.
Before I got the ollas I was using soaker hoses to water my vegetable garden. I had the hoses lying on the ground and covered with mulch, one winding around each bed, and would attach the garden hose to them, often leave them trickling overnight to water my plants. Forty ollas turned out to be enough to completely replace the soaker hoses in the vegetable garden, so now the soaker hoses have been relocated to the fruit trees.
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| Ollas installed in the garden. |
Pros and Cons of Ollas
So far the pros have definitely outweighed the cons for me. They are much easier to use than soaker hoses. I just fill them up when they need it, and then I'm done. I don't have to worry about remembering to turn the hose on or off. It's also very easy to tell when I need to water the garden. It needs it when the water in the ollas dries up. When it's been raining, the ollas empty more slowly because the moist soil doesn't draw the water out as quickly, and when it's dry the ollas empty faster as the dry soil and thirsty plants wick out more water.
I do have to water newly planted seeds or transplants by hand or with a sprinkler because they need time to grow their roots deep enough to reach the olla water. But once the plants are established I switch to only watering them through the ollas.
I usually fill up my ollas with rainwater from the rain barrels, but if I run out (or just don't feel like lugging around heavy jugs of water from the rain barrel to the garden) I use tap water from the hose. The problem with using tap water is our water here is very hard, and I'm afraid the minerals will build up and clog the pores. That hasn't happened yet because I usually use rainwater, but if it ever does happen, I could probably unclog them with vinegar.
There are a few things I've discovered that you have to watch out for when using ollas. One is tree roots. You shouldn't use ollas to water fruit trees (which is why they are in the raised beds and not in the food forest) because tree roots can eventually wrap around them and break them. Every time I harvest a crop and am about to plant a new crop I dig up the ollas and pull mats of roots off of them before replacing them. Often they are vegetable roots, but sometimes a nearby tree will grow a root all the way over to the olla and encase the whole thing with branching roots. If given enough time they would break the olla (besides stealing water from the veggies), but ripping them off once or twice a year seems to be working so far.
I've also found out that despite the lids, there are critters that can get into the ollas. Sometimes one gets infested with mosquito larvae. I'm not sure how that happens. Is it because the rainwater I put in had eggs in it? Are the mosquitoes quick enough to lay eggs in them during the short time I have the lid off to fill them up? Are they somehow squeezing underneath the lid? I don't know, but sometiems they somehow manage to get in there. During mosquito season I also let the ollas completely dry out before refilling them with completely fresh and clean water in the hopes that any mosquito eggs or larvae in there will die before I fill them up again. Sometimes I might have to resort to using mosquito dunks.
Other critters can get in there as well. Apparently slugs can easily squeeze under the lids. I guess that's what you can do when you have no skeleton. Sometimes I open one up and there must be at least half a dozen big slugs in there.
And you also have to watch out for beneficial creatures getting in there and drowning, because they're basically pitfall traps if the lid isn't on. Sadly, I once found a dead frog in one. I'm not sure how it got in there. Did it jump in when I left the lid off? Another time I found a frog that was still alive and swimming around in a half-filled olla, and I had a heck of a time trying to fish it out. It kept swimming away from me while I was trying to grab it, so I finally stuck the hose in there and let the water run over until the frog got washed out over the edge of the pot. And then there was the time I took the lid off one that had dried out, and I guess got distracted and forgot to fill it up and close the lid again. A day or two later I noticed it there with its lid off, and a toad was trapped in there. Luckily the toad was still alive and I was able to rescue it.
And finally there's the con that I was able to avoid, but most people probably won't. They are expensive if you have to buy them at retail and have a large garden. Like I said, the big two gallon ones I got retail at around $40 a piece, and each one covers an area 4 feet in diameter. I lucked out because I was able to get them used, and got enough used ones for my entire vegetable garden. It would have been very expensive to buy so many at retail prices. You can try making your own out of terra cotta flower pots, which may be somewhat cheaper, but those pots aren't as porous as real ollas and I'm not sure if they work as well. I had considered making some of them myself until I found the amazing Craigslist deal.
Overall I'm very happy with my ollas and feel very lucky that I was able to find such a good deal on them. They work well even in my clay soil. They seem to work with all different kinds of plants, especially larger ones like tomatoes and squash (sometimes small plants have trouble reaching the ollas if they are too far away). And I haven't actually done the math, but I would be really surprised if I wasn't saving water using this method.
If you can afford to get ollas for your garden, then I definitely recommend them.
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