We typically will plant our tomatoes as deep into the bucket as is possible that still allows some greenery to be above the soil. The specific depths depend on when we start the tomatoes and how big they are at the time of transplant. Tomatoes will grow roots on stems that are submerged under the soil, no different in this system! We do one plant per bucket. No matter what you do, the plant will grow!

Hi Camille. Thanks for your kind comment. We decided to go soil in ours and I still think that’s best for the moisture wicking capabilities that this system needs. We actually make our own soil, it ends up a fair bit cheaper at our scale. (100+ buckets & containers.) We detail our soil processes fully here, we use the “Frosty Garden Secret Weapon” recipe about a third of the way down the page. Most store bought soils would also work and this is definitely cheaper for smaller systems and gardening efforts. If I was going that route, I’d probably use Promix in them. For fertilizer, we use Jack’s (aka JR Peters) line up. We like this lineup because they provide a “constant feed” rate, which is helpful when you start to blur the lines between soil and hydroponics like we are with this system. Hope that helps!

Really like your article a lot!

Can you share with me what soil/soiless mix you use for the hydroponic fertilizer solution? Do you start with soiless grow medium and apply liquid fertilizer from the start?

Thanks!

The product is made from a reasonably high grade plastic. I’d suspect at least 10 years if you take good care of them, but there’s no reason they couldn’t last much longer. We haven’t seen any reliability issues thus far.

Cool, we really like ours as well! We find that filling ranges from every 2 days (squash) to almost a week plus (peppers/tomatoes). We don’t usually get that hot here. We have also started using liquid soluble fertilizer in the buckets for high demand plants, such as squash and tomatoes. The most challenging for us has been squash, because they drink so much, but I’ve never seen better growth from squash either! We will likely consider more of them, we like them so much!