Wicking Bucket Containers - Budget Built for patio container gardening

what's up guys a little bit of everything Southern Homestead here today we're talking wicking tub buckets this is a budget based build real cheap to make but man the results are great all right so here we're looking at a few wicking tub buckets again kind of like the Earth boxes the imsco boxes are the actual wicking tubs except on a smaller scale you have the container here which is a food grade kind of opaque plastic bucket we have the fill tube to fill the water inside there's a one gallon jug and then we have the drain hole you can see this is some cabbages that I planted they're looking pretty good pretty healthy you can see there's five I've been kind of delaying this video waiting to get it done uh I have the sixth cabbage here that we're gonna plant today on the video and you can see how small and restricted it's been in this container I want to say these have been planted for a couple weeks now but we gotta try to plant this one and let it grow up gotta catch up to these but as you can see they all look pretty happy they're all healthy growing good all right so the goal today is going to be to replicate this bucket here again this is a wicking tub bucket it's a five gallon bucket inch and a quarter PVC pipe one gallon jug on the inside half inch drain hole towards the end of the video when we water these I'll show you why I like these buckets the transparent nature kind of lets you keep it oh I don't know the water level without having to worry about how much water is coming out the drain hole there so these are food grade buckets uh you'll find a lot of people you 've been on the internet saying that you have to use a food grade bucket but then these same folks aren't using food grade water hoses and all the other things that they use in their Garden so the reason I have food grade buckets is because these were free uh local industry here in town you can see they had caramel coloring in them gave them to me and uh they work great for a bucket planner for one cabbage two lettuces one tomato um you know one broccoli one cauliflower you can probably put four mustard green plants or four kale plants in them but we're going to show you how to make them uh this is just some inch and a half or inch and a quarter PVC pipe this is uh schedule 40. it doesn't have to be the thick PVC pipe it can be the thin you're just using it as a way to get the water into the bucket and then we'll just use a standard gallon milk jug uh nothing really fancy about it this is a tea jug I have some that's water some that's milk uh just any kind of one gallon jug what we'll do is we'll cut a hole in the top put the fill pipe in we'll drill a few holes in the actual container we'll put that in the bucket fill it up with dirt add our fertilizer top it off with dirt put our plant water it and then watch it grow all right so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to drill the holes in our one gallon container and just for the purpose of this uh video I'll mark the holes there there so for the top four at the bottom you want to try to get very close to the bottom there see if you can see that see that I like to leave the cap on when I'm drilling it gives a little bit more stability so one two three and four and this drill bit is about 1 8 inch it's not very big it's probably a little bit bigger than a large pencil lead we'll do four at the bottom and this just allows the water to come and go freely into the Container without letting dirt in stuff on YouTube about the certain size of this hole there we go so one two one two one two one two so from there we'll take the cap off we can throw that away you don't really need it we have our half I mean inch and a half or inch and a quarter pipe we'll drop it on top here we'll take our marker and we'll simply trace it and this is just so we can cut it out to make it fit like that so there you go yep just like that so we'll take our razor blade and we'll follow just on the inside of the line there you want to be real careful because you want a real tight fit so the dirt doesn't fall into The Jug because as the dirt gets on the inside then it'll plug up your holes and your water won't be able to get in and out all right like that you can see that there before we go any further we'll do a little test fit and it's good if it's if it's a little tight going in that's fine maybe just shave a little bit more off of this one the tighter the better but at the same time it's got to go in all right try that again there so like that jug and pipe combination it just slides right on in but we still got to do a little work on the pipe if you have a flat pipe like this and it sits on the bottom of the jug and the water can't get in so what we want to do is we want to cut it at about a 45 and and what I've been doing that's been working is I'll measure 40 inches I'll come to 20. which would be there I'll mark it and then whatever you have to cut it the hacksaw circular saw uh they make PVC Cutters I'm not sure if they cut on a 45 but I'm using this little DeWalt hand saw it doesn't quite go all the way through all right so like that it doesn't have to be perfect no real measurement on the angle as long as it's cut at an angle make sure it has no shavings in there and we'll go ahead we'll put that in our bucket we're in our jug like so and what I like to do is I lean it towards the handle and then what ends up happening is it goes in the bucket like this and we'll grab the other camera give you a better picture of it all right so I just did a little cutaway here you can see the pipe there at about a 45 there's the handle I'm just trying to hold it all together here so it's going to sit just like that you can see here it's off the bottom so the water's gonna be able to always come out of those little drain holes there and that's how it sits in the bucket just like that just wanted to kind of give you all a visual visual representation of what it's going to look like on the inside and that's all just going to sit down in the bucket like that drain hole is there we're going to turn the handle towards our drain hole we'll come up it's gonna be in there let's see if I can and then pipe down in there so jug is in the bucket fill tube is in The Jug I have it angled away from the handle because the handle is the most rigid part of The Jug and then you just kind of stick it in the middle there we'll fill it up with dirt it may tend to kind of migrate to one side but we'll have a drain hole down there five inches from the bottom and I'll show you that here next and then we'll fill it up with dirt halfway we'll add our supplements we'll fill it up the rest of the way and then we'll plant our plant just that easy all right so we have our bucket here and we want our drain hole to be five inches from the bottom and that's the lower portion of the actual drain get our tape measure here see if we can show all this on camera there all right so you see there five so we'll mark that like such and we're having a half inch drill bit see if I can show this to you here so there's our Mark we want the bottom of the hole to be at five inches so we're gonna be slightly above it when we drill our hole so we're gonna do that now all right perfect so you see we have five inches hole just on the bottom of our five inches so our bucket make sure any plastic shavings are out and we're going to do jug and pipe and you want it it's close to the hole as possible so it's gonna be just like that I'm gonna show you the inside here so an inside look so our hole if you can see it there and the handle of The Jug is going to line up with the hole and then we come out and we have our field tube I like to leave my field tube a little tall especially with these cabbages they get real bushy and I don't want to have to move and break leaves to be able to get water into The Jug so what happens is we'll fill it with dirt halfway we'll add our additives we'll fill it with dirt the rest of the way we'll plant our plant and then we'll water it in when The Jug is full it allows water to escape from this hole so you don't over water and flood the plant thus killing it causing root damage root rot it's really a simple way to prevent over watering but leaves the soil nice and moist so when the plant does need water it can just absorb through its roots so let's fill it with dirt all right so in this blue bin here I have some dirt that I'm going to be reusing so it was used previously for some fig tree uh start cuttings our cutting starts I should say but it still looks pretty good so we'll fill our bucket up just above The Jug here and I have some new soil here as well so we'll kind of do a mixture of the two all right just like that you sure we'll pack it in along the sides here Against The Jug you don't want to smash The Jug because then we're going to limit our water capacity but we don't want the dirt to just pack after the fact and then we just lost out on a whole bunch of growing room foreign all right so just like before we have our 464 sustain we'll put about one and a half handfuls here I bought a handful of the organic garden lime about a half a handful of a quarter handful of the sea salt minerals and I like to add just a little bit of this organic plant tone all-purpose fertilizer because I know it won't burn the plants even though we have that sustain this is a more immediate release so we'll kind of mix that in there we'll add some more dirt so I'll try to really pack it in there pretty good just fill it all the way to the top [Applause] [Applause] almost there [Applause] all right that looks pretty good all right so here we're going to plant this little cabbage used pretty well root bound there so we'll kind of loosen it up just a little bit we don't want to break anything we're just going to put it right there in the middle I like to plant them a little bit deeper than what they were originally just because the stem was a little longer and it was kind of overgrown the container was in so it was trying to chase the sunlight we'll add some more dirt on top be careful not to break the leaves here foreign from the top and we'll fill in the one gallon jug at the bottom and that just makes sure it stays good and moist so this cabbage can grow to the best of its potential here all right that's looking pretty good last little bit here and then I'll show you where the magic happens in this kind of bucket all right so what I got here is a two and a half gallon uh watering I guess bucket and I'm gonna be pouring the water straight down the pipe into the one gallon container and you'll actually be able to see through the bucket the water level as it rises up to our drain hole and to me that's just a better indicator I can walk by the plants I can see I hope those need some water those don't versus where normally I would just fill in a drain hole or the drain tube until the water came out the side which that works well too I've also seen some people on Facebook who have little Bobbers down the pipe here where when it gets real low the bobber floats down and it falls below the level of the pipe so they know to come and give it some water I'm just taking my time filling it up uh the water is gonna seep out the holes and we just got to give the dirt some time to get saturated here you go you can see the magic happening water levels Rising the bucket's changing color you know you're getting water up to that five inch Mark where the roots can just make their way down to try to get to that water we're also going to water on top just because this is the initial watering but before we do what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a little Rim ring around the sides here and I'm gonna put some 10 10 10 some slow release and this is just to help the plant get a little extra nutrients from the top until it can reach down below to where all the other nutrients are at so like I said I'm just going to kind of cut a little trench here before I water it in sprinkle a little bit of that 10 10. and I'm gonna do that on both sides so like that do a little bit of here all right good pack it all back down all right looks like we got a little Trash coming out the hole that's not abnormal but I'm gonna water it in on the top just because this is the first watering but any of that loose soil just wash off the sides try to really get some liquid down to the base here where the roots are at since we just planted this and it was root bound but like that you can see our water level is right where we want it so if we would keep filling it up the water would just keep coming out this hole and it would never get any higher so when it rains if you over water because you have your water on a timer you can't you can't over water these buckets which is the beauty of the subject they give the plants water constantly but not to the point of where it drowns them all right so here we have the same kind of bucket set up wicking bucket I have two romaine lettuce I did the exact same thing as before the only difference is this time when I put the 10 10 10 I made a little Groove there and I put it right in the middle obviously if you put it here on the sides you'll be a little too close to the plant you take the risk of burning a plant same thing water in from the top fill the drain tube or the fill tube I should say and then watch the water come out and fill up to the line and it'll be perfect so if you follow the channel you get to watch these grow uh I may thin him just let them kind of get set up first figure out which one's going to be the strongest and then thin out the two weakest sometimes I like to leave two plants just in case but I think they're gonna love it Lettuce is a very fluid uh plant has a lot of liquid in it kind of like a tomato so the more water you can get to the plant when it needs it the better all right well here's another example of my wicking buckets as compared to just a traditional potting method this is some persimmon seeds that I started a year ago uh if you know anything about Persimmons they're pretty hard to propagate I think I planted 10 seeds I ended up with six uh germinated seeds I grew into plants then I lost one but you can tell the significant difference between the wicking bucket and just the regular pot the plants are a lot taller see if I can zoom in here for you a lot taller there as compared to that plant pretty tall here as compared to that plant and then what I have here is just a bottle covering the fill tube just so water doesn't tend to evaporate as fast but you can see my water level looks good all this is the water that's drained out we got a recent rain pretty heavy about an inch and a half two inches of rain yesterday same thing on this one so they'll never over water as you can see water lines there drains out the hole dirt on top is a little moist but that's just because we got a recent rain these trees even lignified I don't know if you can see here a lot faster than these other trees here which are starting to like defy now which just means the green is turning into Barker to Wood this one has a really good lignification process where you can see here kind of transitions back to the green but the growth difference is pretty substantial as you can see here uh the plants just seem to do better [Music]

Channel: A Little Bit Of Everything Southern Homestead

Views: 1,641,887

Keywords: Container Garden, Gardening, Wicking, Bucket, Homestead, Mobile, Container, Growing, Vegetable, Self watering, Self wicking, 5 gallon, Self watering planter

Id: BeP7FxU61q4

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 07 2022