Earthbucket

We recently had a chance to see an earthbucket (like an Earthbox®) at our local Dorkbot (dorkbotpdx) group meeting. I can’t for the life of me remember the gentleman’s name at this point–sorry!–but he has been telling us about his earthbucket adventures for quite some time and finally brought an empty setup in so we could see what was going on. The idea is fabulous and we immediately went home and built one.

I’ve got a couple process pictures:

All the parts together

The interior of the bucket with the two main components in place

Watering pipe in place and dirt in the bottom

Bucket all full of soil

Top ring on with covering plastic sheet with planting holes

Here it is 2 weeks after planting lettuce

So the build took us all of 1 hour. The hardest part was fitting the top on after it was all built because we were using 30mil plastic sheeting which was a bit too thick. We really like this design as it takes up very little space, we haven’t had to water it at all since planting–though we will soon–when we do have to start watering it, it will only be every other or every third day and finally, we can take this little design in the house for year round growing. Though we still want to do our aeroponic system, this is a good interim step that gets us veggies in the winter with minimal cost. We happened to have all these parts on hand.

As a bonus, we have a couple few progress pictures from the garden and the chickens. They are both growing up fast!