So, we kind of skipped over this part earlier in the season. But, a lot of people get curious about our container gardening solution.
For those that have been around, you all know that we use and love GroBuckets. This is a commercial kit that turns a standard 5 gallon bucket into a sub irrigated planter. Sub irrigation is a growing technique that’s quite old, but the gist is that there’s water beneath the soil and it will effectively wick into the soil. This keeps a nice, even moisture level across the soil, reducing drought conditions and overall watering requirements.
The primary reason we use this technique is because we grow off the water grid. Regular container gardening is incredibly water inefficient, whereas subirrigation allows you to use 99%+ of any water applied to the garden. It wasn’t until we implemented this technique that we were able to get pretty close to 100% rain water catchment.
Now, there DIY versions of this same kind of growing technique. But, for us, growing well over 100 containers, we really needed something scalable and that’s why we went with a commercial solution. Some people find them expensive, and they aren’t the cheapest thing out there, but we did find them comparable in cost to raised beds when consider plant-for-plant scale.
We’ve been using this technique for quite a few years now. It started at a small “trial” scale and is now the primary solution we use for container based food production these days. We’ve found it quite good, efficient and it works wonders at reducing our labor inputs into the garden. We do still use the occasional fabric pot or various other containers, but these are fewer and further between.
We are somewhat advanced users of sub irrigation, so one thing we’ve done with this garden is centrally irrigate them. This allows us to fill a single reservoir and it subsequently keeps all the buckets in the system fully irrigated. We use a nearly identical system in our greenhouse, as well. This solution has proven reliable for at least five seasons now and we absolutely love it. We also have about 30 GroBuckets that are fully standalone, just like they were intended to be used.
In case you’re curious how we fertilize in this system, we’ve gravitated towards 100% fertigation. We almost treat these systems like they are hydroponic systems, except that our medium is soil. Effectively, this means we’re treating the reservoir to a particular PPM/EC. We’ve played around with various techniques and this is what works best for us. We can scale the fertilization based on plant maturity quite easily this way and we never have to be worried about whether our system is nutrient deficient.
We have quite a few resources on this system, from the GroBuckets themselves all the way up to our centralized irrigation. Quite a few of our followers have had great success with these as well. The biggest challenge these days is that black buckets, which absorb heat quite effectively, have become prohibitively expensive. Even then, quality buckets that are taken care of will last many, many years. We also think we’re all still struggling with getting a solid grip on what anything costs with inflation as it has been.
But, in case you’re curious about learning more, we’ll link a video down in the comments that we did on the system last season that goes into a bit more detail. In the video description, there’s also a bunch more links back to our website with various topics about it.
