Water tanks are, without a doubt, a home essential. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be part of the BASIX requirements. But the thing with water tanks is that they can be unsightly because their designs do not usually match the designs of houses. As such, many homeowners do everything they can to hide them.
A number of methods are used to hide water tanks include hiding them behind concrete walls painted to match the colour of the rest of the house, getting a tank that’s of the same colour as the house itself, setting up the tank at the blind spot of the house, and placing the tank behind a number of trees. While these are amazing ideas, they can cost money and time on your end.
If you want a different, more natural look, one method of concealing the tank that’s not only effective, but also time- and money-saving, is covering the tank with plants to turn it into a vertical garden. By doing this, all space consumed by the tank is recovered.
Steps:
- Determine how much sun the tank’s position gets each day. The amount of sun the tank’s position gets each day not only determines if the plants you’ll attach will thrive, but also the types of plants to place there. Keep in mind that not all plants thrive with sun exposure lasting several hours.
- Determine the small plants that can be placed on those areas where the tanks are, keeping in mind that not all plants like long hours of sun exposure. Hardy succulents can be planted on an area that gets lots of sunlight exposure throughout the day, while herbs should be planted on an area that get lots of sun from morning to midday.
- Create the growing medium, or have a gardening expert make it for you if you don’t know what exactly works for you.
- Determine the tank’s dimensions using the appropriate measuring tools.
- Use the tank’s dimensions as basis in creating a planting bag out of durable landscape material.
- Position the planting bag around your water tank. Create holes to accommodate taps and piping.
- Cut small holes along the top of the planting bag so a stainless steel cable can be threaded through it.
- This cable must then be connected to form a circle, then tightened around the top part of the tank.
- Cable number two should then be positioned midway down your tank to support its overall weight. Otherwise, the entire vertical garden will fall apart quickly. This should be a little loose at this point so the bags could still be filled.
- Fill halfway all planting pockets with growing medium. Then transplant seedlings, fill up all pockets, and water the whole setup well.
- Fully tighten the middle cable.
The last step is the installation of an irrigation system on the vertical garden itself. There are many possible approaches to this, but the best one is setting up a drip irrigation system connected to the rainwater storage tank the vertical garden is built upon. In this system, every pocket has an individual dripper, which is connected to a timer (that is on the tap of the tank) which switches the pump on the same time each day for approximately ten minutes.
In the case of a vertical garden with succulents, no need to set up an automated irrigation system with them.
Leave A Comment