If you’ve been having a hard time keeping up with watering your container garden, the Blumat watering systems from Sustainable Village are just what the doctor, er, I mean the horticulturist ordered. The systems employ the physics of water pressure, not an electric pump, to distribute water where your plants need them—and that place is at the roots.

The Blumat line of watering systems encompasses products for everything from individual pots to crops on small market farms. For this post, we’ll discuss the products appropriate for container gardening.

Blumat Easy, Classic and Globe

Most all of the Blumat products—whether it’s for market farms or your individual houseplants—use ceramic cones. You insert these ceramic cones into the soil near the plants’ roots—whether that’s in a pot, a raised bed or in the ground. The cone regulates how much water is released depending on the soil’s moisture level. That is not a new concept; in fact, buried ceramic pots such as those used in ancient Native American cultures have been used for thousands of years. What some Blumats do is use tubing to connect to a source of water such as a bowl or barrel rather than fill a ceramic jug.

Blumat has three products that are perfect for home gardeners who have small gardens or plants in containers. The first one is pretty simple and likely employs a technique that you’ve used before: Turning a water-filled plastic bottle upside down and inserting it in a container or in the ground. In the case of the Blumat Easy product, it’s a ceramic cone that comes with a plastic bottle adaptor. The adaptor easily slips over the bottle opening. And because the Blumat cone is a porous ceramic, the water releases only when the surrounding soil becomes drier than the moist ceramic cone. Water equilibrium at work!

The second product is the Blumat Classic. This is a ceramic cone with a thin tube that siphons water from a reservoir such as a bowl, a jug—or even a bucket if you’ll need that much water!

The Blumat Classic uses tubing to draw water from a reservoir to the ceramic cone.

The third product is a more decorative version of the Blumat Easy. Instead of using a plastic bottle, it has a decorative glass globe that you can fill with water. Fancy! I found a video that explains how the Blumat Classic and Easy work—find it HERE.

Take a Watering Break

All three are good tools to use for watering container gardens. These Blumat devices ensure the plants don’t experience any moisture draw-downs that can happen during hot summer days. If you want to go away for a few days and don’t trust the neighbor to remember to water, these Blumat devices come in an XL version, too, so it can hold and disperse more water.