What is going on everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. My name's Kevin. Today we're going to talk about

Using an ancient method. This would be the oya the clay pot that you fill up and sub-irrigate your garden.

So there are certainly commercial products, I believe grow oya is the one that I've used in the past.

Really great product, but you can also

DIY an oya out of just a couple terracotta pots. But first of all, let's go ahead and

talk about what it is at a high level and then why you would actually want to use this in your

garden. So it is an ancient irrigation technique and it relies on the fact that terracotta clay is

porous if it's unglazed, which back in the day the technology wasn't even

available to glaze it and so that's what they were doing.

So what happens is you'll take the oya which is usually a bit oval in shape with a nice long

Wide-Mouthed neck so you can pour water in it and you will fill that up with water and you'll dig a hole in your garden.

Typically this works really well in raised beds as a substitute for like a

soaker hose or a drip hose and what you'll do is you will fill it up, bury it, and you will leave just a tiny bit,

maybe one inch of the neck available at the top. You can actually refill it and

then from there you will cover it up with soil and pretty much that's it.

So what ends up happening is water will seep out through the terracotta clay into the surrounding soil and then as that

soil if it is not already extremely moist it will wick outwards in a spherical

pattern underneath the soil.

Now that only happens for a short period of time

because after all of the soil has enough water in it

it will stop pulling via capillary actions so you'll have

oftentimes when you first put the oia in it will wick out like crazy and you'll need

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