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If you work a regular 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. office job and grow flowers or other plants in your backyard, then you probably understand the appeal of having a self-watering garden or something close to it. Fortunately, setting up a hands-off watering system in your garden or flower beds might just be a bottle of wine away. It’s based on an updated version of a 4,000-year-old method used in ancient China and North Africa that taps buried unglazed terracotta pots as an underground watering system.

In the updated version, the pot is above ground and comes in the form of a repurposed wine bottle. Any wine bottle will do, provided that it holds no more than about 3 cups of liquid. For probably obvious reasons, the cost of this will vary, depending on what kind of wine the bottle contained. The unglazed terracotta is still in the picture but it has gone from being a bottle or pot that you bury in the ground to a spike that is deep enough to fit the neck of the bottle in. A 4-piece terracotta spikes set will run you about $10 if you buy it from the Bio Green Store online.

This hack works very well for growing tomatoes and squash. It also is a good system of watering for watermelon gardens. Basically, you’ll use this underground irrigation system with any plants that have fibrous roots. You can also use it to water herbs or lettuce plants, too, since those plants’ root systems aren’t very deep.

The system itself is easy enough to set up. You basically wet down the garden spike and then plant it in the soil. After you rinse any wine residue out of the bottle, you’ll fill it with water and turn it upside down, planting the neck of the bottle into the terracotta garden spike. The bottle will gradually release the water into the ground and cover a radius of nearly 20 inches. A small-mouthed PET bottle works here, too, in case you don’t drink enough wine to have a few spare bottles hanging out in your house.

There’s another way you can tap the spirit of this system without buying the planter spikes or the wine (for the wine bottles). If you have old unglazed terracotta pots and the matching saucers to go with them, you can use that with this system. (These must be unglazed so that the water can still seep through the pots’ pores into the ground.) You’ll plug the hole in the bottom of the terracotta pot with a cork or some glue and then dig a hole in the ground that’s large enough to hold the pot.

After that, you’ll fill the terracotta pot with some water and then place the saucer on top as a lid. This reduces the possibility of evaporation. A rock placed on the lid keeps things in place until it’s time to fill the pot up again – usually every two to five days. This cuts down on garden water usage by about 70% per The Old Farmer’s Almanac, so it’s worth the investment.