DIY hydroponic pot for ~36€

So this is my first non-IT post on my blog and I hope it will help somebody save a few bucks.

One of my hobbies besides programming and teaching is gardening. I recently bought a hydroponic pot that automatically waters the plant for about 60€ and it worked amazingly well with lettuce:

But since it uses a very simple principal I thought 60€ are a bit much for that so I decided to make my own.

Thanks to my awesome Gimp 2.8 skills I was able to produce this paint-like schematic of what I'm going to build and how it should work:

There are actually two possible solutions for transporting the water to the surface. I chose a water pump but it would work equally well with a small aquarium-air pump that would be connected to the hose aboth the water level.

You'll need those things:

• A planter (pot without holes)
• A smaller flower pot that should not touch the ground of the planter - I used a flower bowl (didn't even know those things existed)
• 1m garden/aquarium hose
• 1 T-piece for the hose
• An aquarium water pump
• Hydroballs

I picked up everything for 36€ (about 49$)

These are european prices btw so in the US the parts should be much cheaper. It probably will cost you only 30 bucks or so

Enough of the theory..

Let's build it

The plants really seem to love this kind of pot as you can see in the first pic of the lettuce. The last picture shows the young pumpkin plant. A few days later under fluorescent lights it looked like this: