Fabric Potted Pots as Drainage for Porch

Potted plants in "grow bags" suck up moisture from low-lying areas that drain poorly. [NUC #12]

TL;DR: Place grow-bagged plants in water-prone areas to keep them dry. [Novel Use Case #12]

I have a screened-in porch, with low spots that drain poorly after it rains. Conventional wisdom might be to cut a drain hole and/or have this area leveled somehow. Both are good solutions. Both would be a hassle.

After pondering this conundrum–and having been introduced to the concept of bag-pots in the form of a gifted avocado tree nearly a year ago¹–I had another novel/questionable idea: use bagged plants as moisture absorbers! Plants need water, and each inexpensive cloth grow bag would act as wick from the concrete floor to this natural moisture repository.

It’s a neat idea, which–friend, gardening aficionado, and source of aforementioned avocado tree–LK classed as clever. But will it work?

Less than an hour between left and right photos. This area has been subject to standing water for years.

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Dry out low spots naturally with bagged plants

So as not to bury the lede–as heavily implied by the TL;DR–yes it works. Based on my limited testing, it appears to work much better than I had imagined. The area on my porch that was constantly subject to standing water now dries out after a heavy rainfall in hours rather than days.²

One might call these moisture-absorbing-and-using bags “water capacitors” rather than drainage. In a similar manner to how electrical capacitors sucking up excess charge, these plant bags suck up water. The plant then put the water to use, absorbing it via their burried roots.

Of course, I’m not the first person to compare the flow of water to electronics. This page explains³ the analogy in a bit more detail, though I’ve yet to hear pots compared to capacitors. Maybe it’s a truly novel analogy, though it’s hard to believe I’m the first to make this comparison. One might even consider pots drying out over time to be akin to how a capacitor slowly “leaks” current.

Wet bottoms?

One possible drawback of using this sort of moisture absorber/plant grower is that the bottom of the bag-pots may stay wet for extended periods of time. It might be a good idea to rotate the plant bag position intermittently during rainy seasons. However, if you get a few dry sunny days in a row, this doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Sub plants out as needed to let the bottom cloth dry out

Look outside the box/bag for novel solutions

While you may or may not have a porch water problem, as with all my novel use case posts, I try to show how a challenge can often be solved–or at least improved–by doing/using something a bit differently than normal. In this case, I had to let the standing water problem bump around in my head for a while before the plant bags idea came to me.

In reality, it’s probably better to level your porch and/or install drains to begin with, but this appears to make things much better–if not perfect–at a fraction of the cost and effort. Also, I like having plants around. All bets are off if we get a really sustained storm/hurricane, but I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

If you like this post, you might also enjoy👇 -JC

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness.

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Addendum/Footnotes:

1. The avocado tree was also featured here 👇

Thx LK! Mine is healthy, but it still has a looong way to go before it lives up to its parent:

2. Or so it seems. I don’t quite remember how long it stayed wet out there, but long enough to cause problems.

Also note that there are some differences in the photo. I changed the size of bag on the larger plant and generally messed with things. Not exactly the most scientific “bag testing” method, but further observation seems to indicate that this water mitigation method is indeed effective.

3. Which I just kind of skimmed over. It’s just what popped up when I did a search. The page is rather basic, so hopefully that means the author concentrated on the facts rather than making it look “Web 2.0” or what have you.