Dutch Bucket Hydroponics - How It Works & How to Make Your Own Buckets

hey guys we've been discussing hydroponics doing the the rail system showing the lettuce lettuce is one of the really easy things to grow any type of leafy green will do good in hydroponics whether it be rails or NFT deep water culture floating rafts all of those things are easy to do for lettuce when you want to do the fruit and vegetables like tomatoes cucumbers peppers it takes a little bit more space and a little bit more work to it but it's still a pretty simple process this right here is the Dutch bucket setup that I'm working on for this year plants look really good going down this line right here this is the first one that I did and as I got time I started adding more and the ones on the end down there are the most recent ones and I've got four more to do if you can see the end of that pipe down there there's two-inch PVC it's open this system is not even connected yet I don't have a water pump hooked up to it I don't have an air pump hooked up to it nothing and this stuff is going just fine the only thing I've been doing I went ahead and mixed up the nutrient solution and I'll come through here about three or four times a day and just pour some water in there it's got the fertilizer that they need pour it across them roots and they're doing just fine now you can do this without the water pumps without the air stones and stuff if you didn't have electricity you could make this work now the thing is would you want to come along here you know three or four times a day and water these buckets I ask you this question how many unemployed people are there right now in the United States I think there's a lot of people out there who would like to grow some vegetables who have a world of time on their hands if you had a place to set this up outside and you didn't have currents so you can get electricity to it look go out there three or four times a day water these things and they'd be just fine if you wanted to do something a little bit different you can maybe take a gallon jug and punch you a tiny hole in the bottom of it all right decide and set it so it just streamed right into the base of this plant and you could cut out just walking along right here a lot of things you can do to make this work without being complicated what I'm gonna do right now is walk y'all through where I was and how I got to this point right here with a Dutch bucket and go through and explain everything that I saw and why I ended up going this route and all the little things that I noticed in between how well is this working that's a nice healthy plant right there and the first cluster of five pretty little Tomatoes coming on now when you talk about Dutch buckets the primary thing is the bucket it's actually called a beta bucket b80 oh and if you were to go to a hydroponics store or somewhere greenhouse supplier online and order a bado dutch bucket this is what you get right here a little 11 litre bucket got a hole cut right down in the bottom of it right here you'd also get two elbows like this identical and they lock in place like that and they're going to fit in the bottom of this bucket if you look at the profile of this bucket right here see where you have this kind of L shape that's where this elbow is going to go it's gonna fit in here just like that basically it just locks snaps right inside those buckets right there by the time you pay for the two elbows and shipped it to you would be almost seven dollars apiece that's a little bit too much to pay a lot simpler to get some grommets and some PVC fittings and make your own here's a demo that I made up out of a cooking container I saw you had to make in just a minute but I'm going to show you just how the elbows actually work feel this thing up with water so you can imagine it's not going to fill up that fast with a drip line but you can imagine over time as you're pumping fluid into it it's going to fill up and then start to run out the elbows right here and we'll see how much is actually left in the container so the water is going to stop right even with the bottom of this piece of PVC right here and this is going to be the reservoir of water that's left so the way this works is you're pumping fluid in the top and it's going down feeding the roots in this part right here this reservoir will feed the plant in between the cycles generally most of the setups I have seen run it like 30 minutes three times a day I ran mine pretty much all day long the first time I did it and it worked just fine so obviously there's there's some wiggle room there but keep in mind also that as you have this container full of your grow media you're not actually going to have this much water in here you may have this level right here but you're not going to have that amount of volume because your grow media is also going to be sitting in the bottom and taking them a space so you'll really have probably only about half that much what I'm gonna do is just take this bucket right here this already got holes in it down here at the bottom of it I'd already done it one time didn't realize it was cut so it's no good but it's as simple as this and you can do it with a square bucket rectangle five-gallon bucket doesn't matter what you're going to do is take your one inch hole saw drill your hole about two inches up from the base inside that hole you're going to put a 3/4 grommet you can get these at Lowe's Home Depot that's where these came from - about a dollar and a quarter piece LDS prepper posted a link on one of his recent videos about getting grommets from Grainger GRA ing er you do have to register I've ordered from them a few times electrical stuff but order some last night I ordered a 250 packs of these for a hundred of them and by the time they added the $9 shipping in it came out to be like $26 so to be like 26 cents apiece for the grommets as opposed to paying a dollar 26 27 at Lowe's Home Depot or wherever else so if you need a whole bunch of them Grange would be the best place to go but if you only need three or four wouldn't make sense paying the shipping this grommet is just gonna go right in the hole just make sure it's seated in there real good you're gonna slide a piece of PVC pipe in it the next thing you'll need is a piece of half-inch PVC about three to four inches doesn't have to be perfect and two half-inch elbows put the elbow on one side go ahead and put it on there and what you need to do is taper this down you can do it with some sandpaper or what I do I just rub it on a cinder block to try to taper it down a little bit so it is sliding here a little bit easier and the way you got to do this make sure you got your hand on the backside so you don't push the grommet all the way in and you're just gonna work this in goes in there pretty easy and then put your other elbow on the inside so now you got your bucket made got your elbows inside and out next thing is to have a return line which in this case right here is two inch PVC and you're going to do the same thing take the same hole saw and drill a one-inch hole in here and the only thing left is to take another small piece of PVC and it can vary depending on exactly where your return line is and how tall your buckets are and that kind of deal and just put another piece of PVC on there and that's gonna sit right down in the hole so all the water that comes out of this bucket goes to the return line and drops out to the end where your reservoir is going to be this is a really simple process right here we've talked about root systems plenty of times I want Tomatoes how they grow and this is different when you're growing in a hydroponic setup that's why you can get away with such a smaller bucket you don't get the same kind of root growth this is one of the tomatoes that I had that came out this is growing in the perlite and you can see how fine the roots are you don't get them great big muscular type roots that are just going out somewhere as far as they can trying to get water this was the roots off that Trinidad scorpion I had same situation all these little fine mesh roots right here you don't get them great big thick roots that you see when you're growing in the ground this is how they're able to grow two plants inside the same bucket in those bado buckets they actually have them sitting in corners like this right here this right here is an example of having two in the same container cut a hole in opposite corners and these are actually cucumbers that I had growing in rock wool just stick the cube down in there pull the perlite up around it water it in and should be fine so after you got your buckets made you need to figure out what you're going to put in them now I tried the big rocks I did the little small rocks I did the hydroton and also did perlite and what I found was there was no difference in the growth of the plant it didn't matter what I put in those buckets the growth was the same so that being said the next consideration is cost these rocks were not cheap the hydroton is definitely not cheap the cheapest way to go is the perlite this is my last four buckets right here and my twenty one set up the new setup that I'm doing and like I said I wanted to use perlite because it was lightweight and it was cheaper and it would just be easier for me to work with but I couldn't just dump it in here because it would've come right back out clog everything up some people that put rags towels in there to use as a filter kind of deal I wanted something a little bit more simpler and pretty much pretty much foolproof kind of so what I did went on Amazon started looking around I think into the backs of getting it from somebody else but looking for paints trainers and the action make paints trainers for a five gallon bucket put your paint strainer down in here fill it up with perlite and put your lid on it and that's it this is the way I buy my perlite the great big 20-pound bags from the feed store so it cost me I think about $18.00 1745 someone just say 18 bucks now it's a good idea to do this outside because it's so dusty keep from getting all that dust inside the greenhouse or your house or wherever you're working at going to feel that buck it up try not to pour it on the ground then you're going to just take your water hose and easier first try to wet the top of or keep it from flying all out and then just start filling it with water until it starts to run out at the bottom now it's starting to run out at the bottom this is kind of settled in a little bit so I may add some more to it see how dusty it is this does take a little bit of time to get it set up so once you get it in place man is it worth it so easy to work with all right so we ought to have it nice and wet that the water finish draining out and then we're taking inside and start planting all right when it comes to planting in this there's just basically two things to remember number one you need roots number two you don't need any soil you don't want any soil in here all you want is the roots and whatever sterile situation you've got them growing in whether they be in the little grow plugs like that something to grow down rockwool some of the sugar cubes whatever you're doing or this one right here was just growing in plain water with a little bit of fertilizer in it what I'm going to do stick this old shovel handle down in here make me a little hole stick all them roots down in there pull the perlite around it and that's it all right after we got the plant in here if you've got a pretty good sized plant and just got a long stem you want to be able to go ahead and make you a kind of you know about eight inch hole down there and set that fan down in there if you got a lot of leaves you need to be able to get the lid back on there so remember I hate cut some of them in half they were two pieces so I could kind of come in from the side and lock around there what I decided to do what I've done is cut a I think of two and eight two and a quarter inch hole in here or something like that and then put this on the miter saw and when I come down it'll cut all the way across here and I'll leave this connected so it'll kind of flex like this and that'll allow me to come back in here if I have a tall plant to open up and slide right around there and snap it on now I've got my lid on the plants in there we're ready to go right here I'm going to do some of these smaller suckers and since they're small enough what I can do I can go ahead and put my lids on them and there'll be a lot easier to work with now these are growing in the little root starter plugs grow plugs different companies make them they work out real well you just take what I do is take a screwdriver and punch a hole all the way through so I can get the stem of these suckers in there pretty good ones like this right here nice roots on there that's that's pretty really easy to work with you just take it I take a six pack and just put one in each corner that'd give me a little bit of space around there there's some nice plants right there and saying situational what I can do I just stick this down in here open me up a hole a little bit drop that down in put a little bit of perlite up to it and then take the water hose and just hose in right down around that make sure that pearlite settles right around the roots and that's it nice and neat hooking up my drip lines they're real easy this is just that regular half inch poly plastic pipe and then you just come along take your punch just punch you a hole in that thing and you got a little coupling fitting like this this one happens to be around somewhere ovals somewhat short summer long doesn't matter you're going to stick that in the end of your tubing and then it's just going to snap right in that hole there now I got my line hooked up and I need to get it up here and get it situated a lot of times there'll be a little hole drilled where you can stick it in but this is working out great because I got a little slot cut in the lid right here and I just take it and it's just going to tuck right in there like that and it's nice and snug won't go anywhere this is my final setup right here I took this smaller of pump if they had to fall away on it we use it over there with something else and I put this a little bit bigger and I've got four inch air stones running into this tub plenty of aeration right now I don't think you absolutely have to do this as far as the aeration goes but I just feel like anything I can do to provide oxygen to those roots will be a plus I don't think it will hurt anyway and as far as the circulating pump it's just this little echo 264 right here about 21 22 dollars spend on where you get it out nothing fancy at all and one note on using the perlite and the paint strainers you can buy the little strainer if you want you to just put around your pump if you don't have a lot coming back to it but uh in this case I knew there'd be quite a bit so rather than having a bunch of perlite floating around a reservoir I'd rather put the strainers inside the bucket and then even if that wasn't enough I could still go back and add a strainer around the pump inside the reservoir but you can look at that right there and there's no perlite coming back into this reservoir those paint strainers I think is going to work out great coming out of the pump I've got 1/2 inch poly plastic pipe get it home depot lowes wherever the elbow is to make my so I don't get any kinks running all the way down the line coming off of that with quarter-inch drip lines each one just slips right into the bucket bucket gets up to about right here with water fluid and it drains back out into this two-inch line dumps into the reservoir and just recirculating 30 minutes three times a day and I ought to make plenty of tomatoes really a simple process well guys that's how simple it is you got a reservoir of water you got a bucket with some elbows in the bottom of it set you a pump in there pump your nutrients up to the bucket let them return back through those two elbows in the bottom into return line and just cycle it back through if the lights went out and you had no electricity yes indeed you could come along here and water these things manually and they keep right on growing being this how you're feeding a whole lot more plants totally different than their lettuce if you wanted to you let this thing run down just about the reservoir empty then fill it back up with brand-new nutrients all the time or just say every two weeks you know clean it all out and refresh it that way you wouldn't have to worry about trying to adjust it if you have the capabilities and the stuff to do it where you can test it and know what to add back to the water that'll work too this is a very versatile setup right here a lot of people do this outside works fine if you've got a nice level place to work with makes it even easier on your patio or something like that work out just fine so I hope that was helpful if you got any questions just asked I'll try to answer the best I can I'm certainly no expert on this hydroponic stuff I'm learning a little bit as I go and as you can see it's working so y'all take care and Lord willing I'll see you next time

Channel: mhpgardener

Views: 3,282,284

Keywords: sharing, God's, blessings, dutch bucket hydroponics, how, to, make, dutch, buckets, bato, greenhouse, hoop, house, vegetable, garden, tomato, gardening, prepping, prepper, homestead, homesteader, shtf, DIY, compost, tips, seeds, raised, beds, easy, hydroponics, self, sufficient, mhp, mph, Virginia

Id: nXy32Dr4Z4A

Length: 18min 39sec (1119 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 08 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/the_drew]

It was a great channel, then he drank Donald Trump's kool-aid and pissed in the well.

His gardening videos are very informative though.

[u/thegoodbadandsmoggy]

Great companion video/follow up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ZZmYNKbfU

[u/ulab]

I don't understand the idea of the L pieces of tubing. If it's just an overflow, there's no need to have the L shaped piece on the inside?

To me it looks like it's supposed to work like a siphon, but for that the outer tube needs to go lower so it sucks the rest of the water out of the system?

[u/YMK1234]

If I'd eat vegs I'd totally get into hydroponics :D