About
About Wilt & Water
A small independent site about keeping plants alive on autopilot, run by one person who reads the manuals and does the arithmetic.
The short answer
Why this site exists
Because the central question in this category has a numerical answer that almost nobody publishes. “How long can I leave it?” is reservoir capacity divided by how much water a plant actually uses. Both of those are knowable. Neither appears on most product listings, and none of the nine competitors we looked at when researching this category published a reservoir capacity, a refill interval or a current price.
So the gap was obvious and the work was not glamorous: compile every published specification, attribute each one, do the division, and say plainly when a manufacturer has not published the number we needed. That is the whole site. There are currently 5 sections, 44 articles and 30 products in the registry.
Who writes it
Scooter M.. Scooter M. is an enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs and do the arithmetic. No lab coat, no test bench, and no plants harmed to make a point.
That framing is deliberate and it is the whole truth. There is no horticulture degree here, no years in the trade, no team. What there is: the ability to read a spec sheet, find a university extension publication, and divide one number by another without flinching. In a category where the differentiator turns out to be published arithmetic rather than credentials, that has been enough.
How it makes money
Affiliate commission. Wilt & Water is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, which means we earn a commission when someone buys through a link here. It does not change what you pay.
What it also does not change is what we recommend. Selection is driven by published specifications and the computed refill interval, never by commission rate. The clearest evidence of that is on the pages themselves: our top pick in the biggest category is one of the cheapest products on the site, and we rank the most-searched product type in the whole niche last with an explanation. The full disclosure is here.
What we publish, and how it is checked
- Product specifications carry the publisher of each figure on the card. Nothing is written from memory.
- Horticultural claims - watering frequency, overwatering symptoms, root-rot causes - are cited to university extension services or the RHS, linked at the point of claim. Never to another blog.
- Computed intervals show their arithmetic and name the assumption they rest on. The method is published in full.
- Prices come from a live data layer with a capture date, and disappear automatically when they go stale rather than sitting there looking authoritative.
- Unciteable figures do not appear. The page says “not published” and moves on.
Who this is for
People who have killed several houseplants and would like it to stop. Not collectors, not people with a propagation station and a humidity log - the audience here is somebody who bought a pothos with good intentions and is now slightly embarrassed. Everything on this site is written for that person, which is why the numbers are always attached to a real pot on a real windowsill rather than left abstract.
What we do not cover
Hydroponics, semi-hydro and leca. Orchid culture, which is a different discipline with a different watering model. Outdoor irrigation at garden scale. Plant identification and pest diagnosis beyond the water-related problems in the rescue section. Anything that would require us to claim expertise we do not have.
Claims we do not make
- Units we claim to have tested
- 0
- Sponsored placements
- 0
- Free products accepted
- 0
- Prices we made up
- 0
Everyone in this category says they tested twenty planters. We have not tested any, and we say so.
What we did instead: compiled the published reservoir capacity of every product here, worked out how many normal waterings that actually holds, and multiplied it by the watering cadence a university extension service publishes. You can check the arithmetic yourself.
It is all on the methodology page, including the pot-size table and the assumption we had to make.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to know, and corrections go ahead of everything else in the queue. Tell us and cite the source. We log fixes with dates on the editorial policy page, because a visible correction history is a better trust signal than any credential we could claim.
Wilt & Water is published by Slate Mill Group. Contact: info@wiltandwater.com.