today I'm repurposing the second-hand stock tank and turning it into a self-watering wicking bed otherwise known as a sub irrigated planner so I thought I'd bring you along and show you a few different ways you can install the overflow plumbing and also configure the reservoir inside so it can hold a little bit more water so this is the 500 litre stock tank that I'll be working with today in its previous life you might be able to see a few holes down there it was used as an earthen bed which is a soil based aquaponic grow bed it came with the system when I bought it off mr. paul van thank you very much sir and I'm repurposing it for now just as a wicking bed and I've had to modify those holes a bit plug one up and whatnot but I'll run through that in a minute these stock tanks you can find them online second-hand on sites like Craigslist and Gumtree and I think even eBay I was told people list them on you can also buy them brand-new or secondhand from rural supply stores and another way you can get them is from drum and tank recycling centers we've got one here in southeast Queensland I haven't dealt with myself but I've been told by a few people they you know are very reasonably priced tanks like this just look a little bit different than the old you know the metal cage IBC's so there may be something you might want to consider if you want a bit of a more formal look day from veneto gardens on Facebook g'day Dave he's also a patron thanks mate he's made up some wicking beds for his father out of some tin troughs so you're only limited to your imagination and what's available for you in your area just to show you as well we also make a lot of wicking beds out of these little barrels 200 liter barrels we chop in half that's actually one of the gingers will be going into this once it's finished so this bed here as you can see is in a very shady position it's underneath our mango tree here now that's what I'm pretty much well after because the ginger I'm planning for different types by the way do like a sheltered environment so that's why this one's being set up in the shade and there's going to be another one made from a similar tank setup here where this pile of compost is at the and so I just thought I'd give you an explanation as to why it's in full shade other beds we have down the back here with different gingers they're in full Sun but I'll do another clip on the different gingers we grow and how we plan them out so this tank here is already in situ I've had to level out the soil because we are on a little bit of a slope here as I said before it's got a couple of holes in there as it was set up as an earthen bed there was lon one liner with water coming into a reservoir and one line with water going out so what I've had to do is down the bottom there I've just popped in a little bit of pipe with an end cap on it through a uni seal and that's just plugging up that bottom hole and I'll be turning that top hole there into the drain overflow basically so this bed here doesn't become a swampy quad mire if we get a lot of rain now when it comes to setting up the little overflows in a stock tank situation like this there's a couple of different ways you can go about it now if you've got a brand new tank and there's no holes in it like this one here there's a couple of very cheap methods you can use to create an overflow I've already gone through them with my IBC wicking bed clips but basically what we've got here is a 25 mil or 1 inch barbed irrigation fitting and around the other end I've pretty much wall just got a little bit of shake off like this little piece here and folded it over I wrapped it around tied it on with a zip tie and that creates a bit of a screen serves two purposes stops any of the sand or the soil inside the wicking bed going through here and then emptying out and it also stops mosquitos getting in and laying their larvae within the reservoir of the tank now to get this to go into the tank you can buy those little top hat grommets these guys are fairly cheap we find them a lot at hydroponic stores and you can find them online and places like that and they fit these barbed fittings beautifully so what we normally do is we drill a hole through we pop it through from the inside and then push the barbed fitting through and that becomes our overflow so I won't run through that today but you can check it out on that other clip up there if you're interested in this very cheap I think all up you're looking at around about you know three dollars maybe four at the most it does help if you've got some flyscreen or shade cloth laying around to create a bit of a screen so if you bought a tank it's got a decent size hole in it or you'd like a little bit extra drainage in your wicking bed you can use these bulkhead fittings they're also called tank adapters in a few different places they're basically a threaded tail with a threaded female fitting at the front and a lock nut what you do is you just put if we can unscrew it the section with the towel from the end through the front with a rubber washer on it and then you do up the nut at the back obviously you get some plies in there and make sure it's nice and tight so then on the backside pretty much more like the barb fittings you put a little bit of flyscreen or some shade cloth around there and then you can zip tie it on and that'll stop any mosquitoes getting in there to lay their larvae and also to it'll prevent any material from inside the bed washing out as it overflows another little adaptation that folks like to put on wicking beds is something to regulate the water in the bed itself to take advantage of storm events if you live in an area that doesn't get a lot of rain with a bulkhead fitting like this it's very easy what you can do is get these little threaded barb fittings this one I've just got from the local hardware store this one happens to be a 25 millimeter into a 20 barb fitting or a 1 inch into a 3/4 barb fitting I think it's actually about 18 millimeters but anyway that just screws in there like that of course you'd use teflon tape to make it nice and watertight and then what you can do is you can make up a little bit of an elbow arrangement out of the irrigation pipe just using a little barbed elbow and you can push that on to the fitting there and that is pretty much all watertight because you're not really working with huge water pressure here the beauty of a little adaptation like this is you can turn this section here and this will raise the overflow point for the bed itself so while it's down low like this you've only got as much water as the reservoir would normally carry but if you've got a one-off rain event and you want to store that water in the bed you can twist this up will actually increase the water holding capacity of the bed up until the point where this hole is in the pipe so you can actually store a little bit of extra water for those one-off rain events if you're in a dry region so whenever the rain events over and you've got a week worth of monster rain coming you can just twist this down again and then you're down to your normal reservoir level it's a little adaptation that I'll be using here now I'm not using these bulkhead fittings so we'll just take this little one out now this tank was drilled to take these bulkhead fittings but I've decided to use uni seals because these guys can be quite expensive depending on where you live and these uni seals I mean these guys here just over four dollars each and it's a one-off and then I can push through some cheap twenty five mil PVC pipe so the Uni seals did need to have a slightly larger hole so I had to drill this one out now I've already got to clip on in regards to more so aquaponics on how you can enlarge these holes so you can check that out if you're interested just to let you know what I did here though I did is up a couple of holes just under the rim here put a long section of wide board down inside the tank so it was covering these holes put a couple of screws in to secure the board and then ran my hole saw after I located it where it needed to go around this hole ran my hole saw through there it stayed in place didn't wobble around and I got a very nice clean cut from it big enough so I can pop this uni seal in so to go through this uni seal what I'm using is a little pipe arrangement I've glued up 25 mil or 1 inch pipe and just into an elbow so that pretty much all just gets pushed straight through the Uni seal it takes it a little bit of a wobble and a wiggle to get through helps if you lubricate it as well with a little bit of water and dishwashing liquid I can tell you and then on the inside I've got an old strainer cap from the aquaponics which is basically just a an end cap that goes on to these PVC pipes and I've drilled it out I drilled it out so small fish wouldn't escape the system so that just goes on there like that and that pretty much will stops any rock because they'll be rock on the inside around this section here from being washed out so with this elbow same idea as with the barbed fitting what I've got is a section of pipe that I'll fix in here later I just don't want to kick it while I'm working around the bed and setting it up and it's going to act as the overflow now because the insides only got the end cap with the holes drilled in it I need some way to stop mosquitoes from flowing down here and laying their larvae in the reservoir so the idea I've come up with is the section of shade cloth just like this pop him over the top this might take a few goes because this is pretty fiddly and I made up a little bit of a clip using a 25 millimeter pipe same diameter and I've just cut down the length of it so what I've so what you do is you just basically slot this over the top of the shade cloth and that prevents any mosquitoes getting down there and laying there wrigglers down in the reservoir but as I said I'll pop this on later after I had everything else set up so now we can get into the reservoir side of things so with the reservoir I'm obviously using the slotted Ag pipe or slotted drainage pipe to act as a void to hold water so this is the hundred mil or 4 inch so there's quite a large void that I can fill with water in there which means fewer trips with the hose to fill up this wicking bed now in the center I will have some sand and what that sand will do is it will wick the water up from the base of the reservoir to the soil level so we can stay nice and hydrated and the plants have access to water all the time now I have seen people just dump a load of rock in there put a barrier in there like a weed mat or something similar then put soil on top the problem with that is rocks won't wick water by themselves scoria is the one exception otherwise known as lava rock I've seen mantas or Richard can i richard his use scoria in his wicking barrels and beds and it works fantastic I've seen some of the harvest his head and it works really well but this rock here I've seen people use rock like this and it just will not wake up water very efficiently I mean you get 8 inches or 20 centimeters of this stuff in there and I doubt very much the water from the very base of the reservoir will make it up into the soil so just something to keep in mind you know if you have to do some tests yourself set up a jug maybe put on I don't know a couple of inches or 5 centimeters of water in the base of a clear jug then pop some of this rock in slowly so you keep the top level dry and just see if any of it wicks up you can the same same with sand and I can guarantee you sand will wick a lot better so I'd either go with the sand or scoria if I had it available I suppose another idea I've seen used are these food gray plastic crates that are wrapped in geotextile or weed mat they're popped down in the base of your wicking bed and they basically hold a lot of water in that cell around the outside you put some sort of wicking agent like the sand and that will bring the water from the base of the reservoir all the way up so just something else to keep in mind it's a lot cheaper to get these secondhand or maybe even thrown out at a tip shop than buying this stuff off the shelf I can tell you I've just got this laying around from different builds I've made on the end of the pipe you can see I've just put some geo textile that's just to stop any rock that I'll be putting into the bed going into their pipe and basically taking up some of the void the water could occupy now it's time to install the water delivery pipe so this is the section of pipe I'm using I think it's about an inch and a half pipe and I've cut off a little bit of a slant down the bottom the reason I've done that is so it'll allow water to enter into the reservoir if I was to put it down just like that and that had just impede the flow while we're trying to fill up the reservoir so I'll just bring the camera down and show you how I'm installing this because the drain pipe is on that side there I'd actually like to put the fill pipe opposite so what I need to do to begin with is just drill a couple of holes so I can secure this in place last thing you want to do is have this in there have someone come along and pull it out after the beds all set up and then you try and work out some way to try and push it back down so when I drill the hole in this pipe I actually like to do it above the lip of the bed just go in once and then come across out the other side now there's up a couple in the bed here pick up the rubbish so the zip tie goes through the holes in the pipe through the hole in the tank back through the other hole in the tank and just a zipper off so these holes being a little bit higher than the edge of the bed just means that when I've done up the zip tie it keeps them nice and firmly in place if I did the holes down lower it means there's a little bit of lift on the pipe sorry there you go that's pretty much well forded so the next part of the build is to work out the sand core now the sand obviously has to sit on something to stop it from running out into the rocks that are going in there and filling up the void and also because they're a very fine grain from going down into the slotted Ag pipe and filling up that void in there as well so I'm just using this woven weed mat and then the sand can go in to form the wick so there we have the beginning of the sandwich so next thing to do is to add rock up to the level of this drainage port here around the outside so there we go just going to unwrap the weed map from around the sand Cornel and place it over the top of the rocks over that we're popping 30 to 40 mil inch and a quarter to inch and a half of sand just wanted to cover why are you sand in the reservoir of my wicking beds originally the first barrels I set up I had some soil down in the reservoir area we had a long protracted period of rain the soil down there when anaerobic and we could smell it from the house our neighbors even pointed out that there was a manky smell coming from the backyard so from there we pretty much all had decided to use a lot of sand in our reservoir not so much to hold the water but to act as a wick to bring it up to the soil level the originator of wicking beds mr. Colin Austin fantastic bloke awesome website he likes to use organic matter in the base primarily the soil that he's using in the beds the reason for this is he likes to run them so they the beds are full of water and then they slowly dry out once the base dries out again then he adds more water I've just found that this method works really well for me don't just use sand because I've used it in my build look around I mean I've seen people use wood tips I've seen people use compost leaf litter decomposing bits of tree but for me I like to use sand but you know I would recommend you look around and see what works best for you you might be able to make out of the sand on the inside of the bed is roughly sitting forty millimeters or an inch and a half higher than the drain port on the outside so I'm pretty happy with that this reservoir as well has a total depth of roughly 20 centimeters or 8 inches now remember that water will only wick roughly 20 to 30 centimeters 8 to 12 inches depending on the amount of organic matter that's in the bed to help it move up through so I'm fairly confident then more than enough water will make it to the base of the soil here and I'm sure the roots of the ginger will find it and they'll be as happy as Larry in there so the next step here is to grab some mulch to put between the sand and the soil so I'm adding in roughly around about 10 centimeters or 4 inches of the sugarcane mulch you can also use loosen mulch and other mulches as well now the reason I add it down there it acts as an organic blanket over the top of the sand so when water has wikked up through the sand it soaks up into the organic matter that is the mulch and from there it can pass through into the soil not only that by mistake we'll actually when I've moved wicking beds I've noticed that there are a load of young worms adult worms and also cocoons living in this damp moist a mulch layer between the soil and the sand after seeing that I was pretty sold on using this idea just if only for that reason it creates a habitat for the compost worms - pretty much will lay their cocoons and multiply now the next thing to do is to screen some of this compost below the camera and also collect some soil from the garden beds over there to fill her up in went a barrow of soil first and that was smoothed out over the top of the sugarcane and then I screamed roughly round about 1/2 to 3/4 of the barrow load worth of the compost over the top I'm just screening the compost to make sure that there's no beetle Lavie in there definitely don't want them chill on the roots of the ginger over the top of that was another barrel load worth of slaw from the garden bed and then Kara came down and helped me screen roughly 3/4 to a barrel loads worth of compost over the top and that was made all nice and level just to show you some of the compost worms were finding in there loads of these big fellows so into this bed I'm popping in some chicken based organic fertilizer pellets they'll be dug through with the compost and the soil that's already in there it's not putting all of them in I am putting in all this kelp though just to help add some trace elements that may be missing from our compost and now cure and I just got to turn this in just to mix the compost through with the soil clay that's pretty much well lit thank you okay just gonna pop this last Barrow of dirt in because I think we could top it up a little bit more so I'm also trying something new for the first time I've added in a little bit of perlite that was leftover from the root pouch mix I've been making up so hopefully that'll keep the soil blends nice and loose and it won't get too compacted in there so now it's just time to fill it up so we're just popping on some sugarcane mulch now probably just to the top edge of the bed and after a while it'll settle down there we go we'll call it quits there hey so before the reservoir is full I better install my little stand pipe here so thank you assistant what I'm doing is just wrapping some teflon Teflon sorry tape just around this pipe here and what that will do is create a watertight seal around the pipe fitting coming through the bed so just probably four or five wraps break her off and we're just kind of put it in there nice and firmly fine screwing it in helps and I've already drilled this one out actually we'll bring the camera down a bit closer so this fittings been used in the aquaponics before and what I like to do is I'm just put a little small hole through there and if my assistant can give me a good bits I'm just gonna pop through this 3 1/16 the steel screw the reason the hole is so small is it'll give this something to bite into and become watertight just pop in true and also to the reason I use the 3 1/16 the steel is because it won't corrode now all we need to do is just turn this whole piece down with the wall off as you can see I just turned it down and as you can see the bed's already full so can you turn the tap off please kara so that's a handy little demonstration on how this little gizmo works I'm I'm pretty happy with the way it's turned out there's no leaks down the bottom here I got water running down from the top but there's no leaks down around that mark there so I'm pretty much we're just going to set this there roughly there and maybe a little bit higher and there we go the bed's all done and finished so I'm really happy with the way this little job II went together they're a very basic little build and I hope those ideas with the different reservoirs and the plumbing the drains help you out you know you don't have to build it exactly the same as this have a look online for wicking beds or sub irrigated planners and you'll get a few different ideas and may be useful for you in your situation as to what will be planted out in these beds I'm looking at popping in some of the ginger I've got a couple of pieces we say from our last harvest and I've also bought some different pieces that I've seen shooting at a greengrocers just to try you know different genetics and see how they go I've also got three other varieties of ginger that I want to plant in here but I thought I'd save them for a clip all by themselves just so I can talk about the different varieties and I might show you the Gau angle and the turmeric as well so we'll save that for another time so if you want to see more backyard farming and aquaponic videos land in your email inbox you can click on that little button down there and you'll get a notification whenever we post one on the backyard farm or aquaponic to YouTube you can come along and say your day in the comment section down below also have a little button up there that you can click on to see other self watering wicking bed builds that we've done around the place here might give you a few useful ideas as well I do hope you're all well and happy and I will catch you next clip and thank you cure for the help cheers all have a great one