Trickle / seep watering from water butt?

[cantkeepawayforever]

We are away on holiday for a fortnight in a couple of weeks and are wondering how to keep the tomatoes in the greenhouse watered. The lean-to greenhouse is not near the water tap but does have a large water butt next to it, fed from the adjacent garage roof.

Has anyone used something like a trickle / seep hose attached to a water butt to very slowly (and inevitably partially) water a bed or greenhouse? Can you recommend anything straightforward and cheap, just to tide us over the holiday period? We may of course have no rain at all and return to a shrivelled mass anyway, but I’d like to try!

Better with something like this. I use them every year.

www.hozelock.com/product/growbag-waterer/

Those look brilliant!

I've used seep hoses but mine needed mains pressure in order to seep. I wouldn't recommend them for this weather unless they're buried, a light drizzle on the surface will just evaporate before it does any good. I think you'd be better with a system that gives them a regular decent soak

Are the tomatoes in pots or in the ground? That makes a big difference to what's possible.

They’re in the ground. We built the greenhouse with paving only in the middle and under the shelves, so one long side is a bed a bit more than 2 feet wide, refreshed with some new compost each year.

That does mean that a growbag watering system (which looks excellent) isn’t a solution in this case.

I know someone who has a small solar powered pump in their water butt, hooked up to a trickle system. They also have 2-3 water butts linked, not sure how long a single water butt would last.

I have a drip irrigation system set up for a raised bed from an IBC, I think you could set up something like this for tomatoes from a waterbutt. I got mine from the middle aisle in Lidl but there are loads out there. Mine relies entirely on gravity to force the water through so works best when the water level is high.