Tree watering bags are available on Amazon from about £8.

A home made tree watering bag made from a black bin liner

Tree watering bags are a common site in municipal parks but are not generally used at home or for street trees. This post tells you how to make your own from a black bin bag.

During the recent hot spell (May 2025) the tree outside my house began to suffer from lack of water. It is surrounded by paving and although I can water it with a hose or watering can the water flows off.

To solve this problem I simply tied a black bin bag around the trunk and filled it with water from my hose. I then made a small hole in the bottom of the bag with a large sewing needle. I made sure that this was over a bit of soil and hoped that water would drip out the bag and soak into the soil.

To my great surprise this worked well. Over the next three days the water all dripped out of the bag into the soil with no wastage. I refilled the bag with a hose. On inspection it could be seen that the bag had a few additional holes caused by abrasion but these dripped very slowly.

In summary, a bin liner can be used to create and effective tree watering bag for a few pennies. This can be very useful for anyone planting a tree in their own garden or who wants to water a public tree.

Making an informal watering truck

I filled my tree watering bag with a hose but what if the hose will not reach? Parks services have a bowser (watering truck) but a home made solution could be to take 25L Jerry Cans of water (about 5 watering cans) to the tree in your car.