In Florida, we joke that our state bird is the mosquito and boy is it a plentiful creature. From approximately March until something like late October we have different varieties of mosquitos that will breed worse than rabbits. If the bites and itching don’t worry you, the variety of viruses they carry do.
Whenever we turn on the tv during this very long season, the reporters give the same advice they give every single year to deter mosquito breeding. Dump out anything and everything that can hold water, stay inside during certain hours of the day and spray yourself liberally with toxic bug spray.
One of the locations that we Floridians forget about as a potential breeding location is our self-watering garden planters. While self-watering planters are immensely helpful if you travel a lot or aren’t able to physically get outside every day, you need to prepare that if they have any openings, you need to seal them up to prevent mosquito larva from being produced.
This model of vertical planter is called the Hydro Farm Tomato Trellis and it features a handle, wheels, trellis and it’s self-watering. If you look closely at the pictures, you can see that they needed a bit of adjusting for Florida weather conditions.
Hydro Farm makes a few products and this one features not one but two watering ports which allows for plant roots to directly receive water versus watering from above. In Florida we have to deal with powdery mildew and sometimes watering from above will cause this to get out of hand which is why root watering is so awesome.
The peanut butter looking goo is actually a type of caulk that my husband purchased and the screen is just a roll of regular of screen that you would use on your front porch. I simply used a pair of scissors to cut out a square that’s about 1-2 inches bigger than the opening, smeared some caulk on the planter and used a piece of broken branch to press the screen into the drying caulk. Follow the directions of your caulk product but I allowed mine to dry approximately two days so I could be assured it wasn’t to slip around and require another application.
As you can see, the watering ports are still accessible if I want to water the roots from below while it reduces or even completely removes the concern for being a breeding place for mosquitos. Outside of preventing mosquito breeding, it prevents a place for venomous water snakes and invasive cuban frogs from potentially breeding as well.
I’ve got two other planters that I will most likely share on here in the coming days but for now I hope my modification gives gardeners hope in deterring some rather nasty creatures out their yards too. Happy Gardening! ^_^
Suburban & Rural Homesteading Today 