Hello,

I am new to this group, so please forgive me if this has been
discussed before.

I have come to the conclusion that the one best place I can put my
garden is on my deck. I do not need a really large garden, just a few
tomato plants, some lettuce, a pepper plant or two, etc. As such, I
tried a self-watering pot this summer on my deck. It more-or-less
worked pretty good. But I am perplexed. It seems that somehow the
soil sits on top of a grided plastic shelf (for lack of a better term)
and the plants above stay watered. I contend that if there were some
sort of wick, the system would work better. Nonetheless, it seemed to
work pretty well and I got a lot of tomatoes off the one plant I had
in the pot.

As a result, I thought I would build my own planters. Maybe one to
start. I was going to use a Rubbermaid plastic container that is
fairly shallow but holds eight gallons of water for my experiment.
The container is about 42" x 21" (forgive me but I do not remember
the depth--it was about 4"-5"). I will put this in a box that is made
of composite lumber. I was thinking about using a bulk head fitting
to drain the container in the winter. Inside the box, I thought I
could put a row of 1x2 just above the plastic container. I would then
build a screen using galvanized steel mesh wire using a mesh small
enough to keep the soil out of the water. In lieu of that, I would
put a piece of screen on top of the mesh.

Do you think this design would work? Do you think a wick of some sort
would help? If so, what material would be best? An old T-shirt?
Strips of old towel? Nothing?

Or would this be a stupid idea?

Any and all comments welcome!