Christophe wrote:An ancient technique but brought back into fashion by a young company to save water and which might be interesting to combine with the lazy vegetable garden in these times of heat wave and lack of water ... what do the specialists think?
What is certain is that it starts by making you lose money !!! How much is this thing worth, compared to what it is (a pot) ???
1) I don't like these "touting" arguments ...
2) Why would something "Sioux" necessarily be "antique" or "exotic" ????
It is necessary to make "believe". And everyone knows that the ancient world was wonderful, that exotic tribes are perfect and naturally green (sure, nuclear power plants and rigged TDI engines are not their forte!) ...
So when I see that, I don't even want to go further!
On the background :
a) A plant has a certain "water requirement", which depends on climatic demand: temperature, humidity, wind speed mainly (and other factors: soil fertility, stage of the plant's cycle) ...
b) from there, two things one:
- or this need is satisfied, and the plant does not stress; she leaves her stomata open; gas exchanges are max, optimal photosynthesis, high yield, growth ...
- or the plant does not find the amount of water; it reduces its losses so as not to dry out and thereby its gas exchanges; its growth decreases ... And if it does not succeed, it withers and can die.
So everything will depend on how easily the plant finds water!
So from his root system and the volume he explores on the one hand ...
And of course the amount of water in the soil on the other hand: the drier the soil, the more it retains water ... Plants have a suction force (the reverse of a pressure) of the order of magnitude of 15 bars.
c) So the porous jars, in there ????
- They do not change the physiological mechanism
- They concentrate the water in 1 point ... So yes, the plant will consume less, because 3/4 of its roots are elsewhere! This does not mean that she does not stress!
- By keeping the surface of the soil dry, they avoid surface losses ... This is the only advantage. It is not zero.
So if we pour the contents of a jar on the surface of the ground, it is clear that part of the water will flow, the 3/4 will wet the first cm around then hurry to s' evaporate. From this point of view, "burying" water saves it. Or more exactly, the proportion of water supplied reaching the roots increases, that's for sure.
d) But the "Potager du Laesseux" is much more Sioux than that and does not need to spend money for such tricks:
- the soil is enriched with organic materials, which are natural sponges
- it is permanently covered, which strongly limits evaporation; the hay is dry on the surface at the moment; the jar does not get better!
- above all, mushrooms are grown there (not hats, filaments in the soil called hyphae, 10 times thinner than hair); and mushrooms are miraculous: with the same amount of biomass, they explore 100 times more volume of soil than the absorbent hairs of plants; they go into cracks that have remained damp; their extraction force is around 90 bars, so they are more efficient than plants in extracting water; they associate with the roots of plants to form mycorrhizae, where plants and fungi exchange what they have (plants, sugars from photosynthesis without which the fungus cannot live; fungi, minerals and water). .
- if necessary (but apart from my greenhouse, I still do not water! The video shot yesterday is being uploaded), I use drip (except for the seedlings): a wet "bulb" is formed underground, similar to these buried jars, except that there are no unnecessary walls; the soil naturally constitutes the reservoir - it suffices to measure the contributions; the dripper being placed at the foot of the plant, the volume explored by roots and mycorrhizae and the volume of this "bulb" of damp earth are superimposed instead of being next to each other ... This is worth a few euros for 10!
So I think this "thing" is completely useless or null in a Lazy Vegetable Garden. But it is on TV, what do you want ... There are still people who, in the Hanouna era, think that if it is on TV, it's true! And then there are those who perpetually need to believe in miraculous solutions, as I said, "ancient" or "Aztec". The Rousseauist myth of the "good savage" (or the "good primitive", the one who pulled his wife by the hair ...) ...
But this is only my opinion.