We definitely find the central irrigation to be a “key” to successful growing in GroBuckets. Container gardening in general is more difficult than in-ground gardening, mostly because of water and soil restriction issues. Central irrigation solves the water issue quite well, plus it makes them very easy (almost hands-off) to use through the whole season. Plus, if you use water soluble fertilizers and fertigation, it can really help boost your nutrition! Good luck next season!

It can be tough to separate buckets that are stacked. We don’t “perfectly” clean our buckets, so usually a bit of rough stuff will help them free themselves. But, otherwise we just work it until they come apart. (Pulling the top bucket with the other buckets trapped by your feet seems to work the best.)

I linked you our soil building page in your other comment, but here’s the link to our soil building page again in case you missed it. We use the Frosty Garden Weapon soil mix detailed in that post. It’s a fantastic soil mix and works great with the GroBuckets. Each bucket uses right about 4 gallons of soil. We fill them to about 1/2 inch of the top of the bucket, tightly packed.

Thanks! That helps a lot! One more question – often when 5 gallon buckets are stacked together they can get so stuck it’s hard to get them apart. Any tips you use for stacking them?
And…can you tell me, or do a post about the growing medium you use in the bucket? Since the water reservoir takes up some room, how much growing medium is in each bucket?

You bet. We really only pull apart the “big” 1/2″ sections to make it more manageable for storage. The Easy-Loc 1/2″ parts are super easy to pull apart and put back together. We do leave the 1/4″ lines and everything else intact with the manifold as that’d be a pain to disassemble and reassemble. We do pull the 1/4″ line out of the bucket, but the uniseal itself stays in the bucket. We can just “stub” it back in the next year. For storage, we just lay the manifold pieces on the ground and let it get covered by snow. Our manifold isn’t super complex, so we can easily identify how it goes back together. But, if it was, we might label it somehow. Hope that helps!

Thanks. I really should mention that. All of our buckets do have an overflow hole, as the GroBucket manufacturer specifies. From memory, we have ours at 3.5″ from the bottom, I think? This allows any overflow to be drained and maintains the air gap of the system. In the central irrigation system, we have to ensure the water level is below this point to avoid general overflow. I would say in general, we run our irrigation levels below that hole by quite a bit. (Maybe about 2-2.5 inches of water.)

Fantastic! It’s a viable method for a lot of different sub-irrigated hardware, easily adapted to different solutions. Good luck with your project!

Hi Bill, thanks! We have not run into any issues with contamination. That could be a risk, especially if you’re growing plants that are prone to root based diseases or if your area or water promotes such things. If this were a major concern, a drip based filling system would be overall much safer. If you were also insistent on saving the waste water from a drip system (like we are, in a low water input garden), it might even be appropriate to develop a return system for the overflow. Although it would be a bit more complicated, such a thing could easily be done with a length of PVC, 1/4″ irrigation hose and some additional Uniseals. Hope that helps, thanks for reading!

Thanks for your kind comment! This has been a great technique for us. This coming summer will be our third year with it. I can’t imagine going back to hand watering, ever!