Water Loving

Looking at this and reading what you said, I bet if we tried hard enough, we could figure out how to use pulleys and weights to make this thing operate on its own with the weight of the water being transferred from one box to the other. When the full-of-water box sank down as far as it would go, it could trip a self re-setting lever that would release a weight on the other box, pulling it down to the tripping lever on that side releasing a weight and so on. If this was possible, It would not have to be manned or have electric. Pulling the weight back up may be a challenge, but we could let gravity work for us.

Clipper

This set up would only work if the plants liked to be wet then dry half the time.

Mike

This limits the plants you can work with. For instance, lettuce likes it wet always while others have to have porous soil. You should get a book on hydroponics to see what plants this would work with. I'm not familiar with any but by no means am I an expert.

John

Now that I look at it again. One could use a water loving plant on one side and plants that likes it dry most of the time on the other or leave one side a temporary storage reservoir with nothing growing.

Mike