This is how I do my super simple Grow Buckets. Takes about 4 minutes to do, and gives me nice and handy self watering containers to grow vegetables in. There’s not a huge water tank in them, but enough to keep me from running around and watering all summer long. I use them both for indoor and outdoor container gardening.
You need:
- As a container: A bucket
- To bild the self watering container: Clay pebbles (or any gravel/rocks - but it makes it a lot heavier)
- To keep the clay pepples separated from the soil: Growing cloth, regular cloth or even old stockings (I tend to use whatever I have at home)
- To make some holes: A drill
- And possibly a pipe to make watering easier (not in the pictures below)
I mostly use buckets like this:
How to do:
- Put the cloth in the bottom of your bucket. Fill about 5-10 cm with clay pebbles (or rocks/gravel). Close the cloth with a strap or tie it with a knot.
- Meassure how far up the bag with clay pebbles goes on the inside of the bucket. This one was about 6 cm.
- Now messure on the outside of the bucket, place the drilling mark 1 cm lower then the measurement you had on the inside - in this case i will place the marker 5 cm from the bottom of the bucket. This will be your super easy overflow mechanism.
I usually mark and drill 4 holes, one on each “quarter” of the bucket. (Sorry about the really blurry image, hope you still get the point..)
- Drill holes on your marks. I usually use a 6-8 mm drill for this.
- Now place your clay pebble bag back in the bucket. (If you want to make watering even more simple, you can at this stage take a PVC pipe and stick it in between the wall of the bucket and the bag of clay pebbles so it creates a watering tube coming up through the soil.) Now fill the bucket with soil. I usually mix a little bit of chicken manure pellets in with the bottom half of the soil to give the veggies a share of nutrients when they start to grow bigger - but that’s of course depending on what I will be growing.
This construction can probably improve a lot, and there is a lot of advanced grow buckets out there. However I find this construction super simple and it works good for me