Watering your orchids when away on summer holiday
 

With the summer months come summer holidays. But what do you do with your orchids to let them survive the heat with no one to care for them?

I'm taking a three week trip and this is how I do it. When I get back I'll make another video to let you all know how well it worked. Wish me luck!

How To Prepare Your Orchids Before Going Away On Summer Holiday - YouTube

Interesting.

I have my plants out on my deck, and I simply have a garden sprinkler timer water them every morning...

Sounds like an easy enough solution! If I ever get a home with a garden I'll probably just try that.

I ordered a 4*AAA battery pump system from ebay called 'Automatic-Drip-Irrigation-Plant-Kit-Self-Watering-Can-Timer-System-Indoor-Garden' ..... hasn't arrived yet. I'm going to be testing the performance of the pump. Like how well it can get water out of a tank without the tubes being primed in advance. If it works nicely, then it might be modifiable ----- so instead of using its own inbuilt timer system, which might not do what we need for our orchids, we could control the pump using some other controlling system.

Sounds a bit elabourate for me, but I hope that it works for you!

Ray, how do you get away with that when you usually use R/O water? Or am I making an assumption about you normally using R/O water?

This arrived yesterday. I can definitely say that this device will certainly work for anybody going away for a trip for up to a few weeks.

I did some testing this morning, and it could easily draw water up (without priming) the supplied fish-tank plastic tube (a few metres of this rolled up tube) from a water tub/tank. Even though the online instruction guide says it can support up to 10 plants, this system will definitely handle a few plants at least.

Has a water pumping time that's settable from 1 second .... all the way up to 99 seconds. And also settable is the number of 24 hour units between the watering.

So for example .... can set the unit to water for say 10 seconds, and can set the unit to water once every 24 hours (ie. water once per day). Or could set the unit to water once every 48 hours (ie. water once every 2 days, ie. with 1 day skipped), or 72 hours (ie. water once every 3 days, with 2 days skipped) etc.

If I were to use this, I would just set it up to put water on the surface of the growing media, which is how I normally water my orchids anyway.

Later, I'll test this system out for endurance/reliability.

For those who are interested, this is how my plants did while I was gone for 3 weeks with the setup shown in the previously linked video:

Results of the Self-Watering System After Coming Home from Summer Holiday - YouTube