Hi. I am a German but live and work in Jamaica. One of my hobbies are plants and mini biotopes. I put a smaller pot filled with water inside a wider pot filled with soil, and never had problems. Just recently I went to the sea, and took a small sample of an aquatic plant and tried, successfully, to give it a new home inside my water pot. Since one week after that, I notice that the pot seems to lose water, now even quite fast up to a certain level which it still holds. Could it be, that this water plant infiltrated the walls of the pot? Thanks for your assistance.
Sven, this is quite a large pot, isn't it? What is it made of? It looks like it could be an industrial piece made from metal of some sort, probably including iron. Do you know what you have growing in it? I can't identify the green stuff or the thick mats of roots. Why do you have a pot of water nestled in a pot of dirt? In cooler areas, it could be for insulation, although come to think of it, I use double pots for insulation from the heat, too. I could also imagine it's for stability. Given that you are in Jamaica, this is probably a salt water plant, or a salt tolerant plant. Either way, whether you add salt or not, there is a measurable salt presence in this water, even if only through osmosis. It's also likely that you have some salt air and salt corrosion within a few miles or kilometers from the ocean. I'm 2 miles from an "inland waterway" of tidal water and I can smell salt air from time to time. You know that salt is corrosive. Could it be that is what is corroding your pot? The water dropping to a certain level is indicating the lowest complete corrosion, which might be nothing more than a pin hole. Another way for corrosion to start would be from the soil or media surrounding the water pot.
Hi Thanrose, thanks for your response which contains some good points. Here are the details: - The outer and inner pots are both plastic, but painted with a black oil-based paint. - The ring between both pots consists of soil, and numerous plants grow from that soil ring (bamboo, asparagus fern, a German crawling plant, and probably even Stevia). - The inner pot contains regular water (no salt water), however, the water plant which looks like long white roots is actually green, and taken from the saltwater. - The entire "home oasis" is located in one of the rooms of my apartment, which is in Kingston and several kilometers away from the sea (unfortunately, ha ha ha). Hope this helps you all to find the reason for the newly appearing water loss.
Okay. Salt doesn't corrode plastic, at least not that I know of. If the plant is a salt water plant, it would have a higher salt content than other flora more inland. Salt would leach from it by osmosis. I gather from your last post that the bit of green in the photo is from the surrounding plants and not the water plant you found. I'm also gathering that the "white roots" as I see them are in fact the aquatic plant. Is that correct? Possible complications: Some plastics might have some permeability due to formulation or intent. That's generally not the case. Many plastics will become brittle with age, or exposure, increasing likelihood of holes large or small. The oil paint could be hiding some micro fissures or fractures, in fact it is because that's the only explanation for the water continuing to drop to a certain level only. Bamboo could very easily be causing damage to the inner pot by root expansion. I still have no idea what the aquatic plant is. Even given that the photo is overexposed or too bright, we don't have enough detail and don't know enough about the original environment to hazard a guess.
All of those roots exposed at the surface will create a large surface area for enhanced evaporation, and the plants attached to the roots will transpire a lot of water. Those roots could also be wicking the water from the inner pot into the soil in the outer pot. Can you remove the inner pot and set it in an empty pan to see if it leaks?
Interesting point. Might be the roots which go out of the pot might bring the water into the outer soil ring. Not sure, though. I will observe.
