What's up everyone, Kevin from Epic Gardening here. Today,
we're talking self watering planters.
Now this is a design I've already done on the channel.
So you can go up in the right hand corner, take a look at that.
But I got sent out this strange package from this guy named Fred.
So from time to time people like to send me stuff on Epic Gardening.
I love checking it out.
Sometimes I don't have the time to kind of look at everything,
but this one really caught my eye so I decided why not make a video about it?
It's pretty interesting.
It's a self watering planter design using five gallon buckets. Now you know me,
I'm all about growing in urban spaces with whatever you have around you.
So five gallon buckets,
that's a pretty plentiful resource in an urban environment.
So why not figure out a way to grow in it?
And that's what Fred's done with some pretty unique little modifications here.
So we're going to dive into the design of this and I'll talk about some things
you want to consider when you're growing in a five gallon bucket that really
will make or break the growing experience for you and determine if you have an
epic harvest or just something a little sad and lonely, diseased and dead.
Which is not what we want in the garden.
So let's hop into this design right now. So again,
this is the one that I've designed and then this is the one that Fred sent out.
Now on first blush, it just looks like a standard five gallon bucket,
which in fact it really is. It's just a five gallon bucket. This one's white,
mine's black.
Black is going to absorb more heat and heat up the soil a little bit more.
White is going to reflect more heat and obviously keep the soil a little cooler,
but it is a little bit more translucent so light can reach in.
And you may have an algae issue down here, whereas you really won't here,
but the soil will remain hotter. So it does really matter, you know,
the plant you're growing and the soil that it prefers,
especially the soil temperature that it prefers.
Because that will determine what kind of color you choose.
But of course with this model you can just get a black bucket too.
So why is this so interesting? Well, first of all,
you've got these holes drilled at the bottom. That's very similar to my design.
Right here you can see. It's hard to see against the black,
but there's some holes right there for drainage.
Now that lines up with what Fred calls the dirt plate, which is this right here.
So my design is a little different.
It's got a cutout lid that's just sunk down into the bottom here and supported
on some wood with a little bit of wicking material,
like a a t-shirt kind of coming up through the middle hole.
Now you can see there isn't a middle hole. In fact,
there's four holes on this one. And why is that? Well,
what's elegant about this, and what I kind of really like about this,
is that the wicking chambers also serve as the supports.
So you have one, two, three, four supports.
So when you sink this down into the bucket, what is,
what is enabling the wicking is also supporting the plate so that you have this
much room for water to sit in. I believe it's about three inches or so.
So you have a three inch chamber for water and you can see boom, it's very,
very solid not going anywhere.
And what's nice is then the dirt fills into these dirt cups and then there are
holes drilled in the bottom of the dirt cups so that the wicking action starts
there. Uh, so it's really nice. You don't have to have any wicking material.
The dirt actually acts as your wicking material cause it falls into these cups
here.
And then also the plate itself is supported by the solidity of these cups.
So it's pretty neat.
And let's figure out exactly how we're going to get it in there.
Cause what's interesting, what I learned,
is that actually five gallon buckets do not come in standardized sizes.
There's about a three quarter inch differentiation in the diameter of different
sizes of five gallon buckets.
So a dirt plate that's one size fits all is not the best idea.
And so what you can see here is there's actually a small lip right here that you
can actually cut into with scissors if you need to.
So what's happened over here, I've gone ahead and done that.
So you just kind of scallop the edges, or whatever term that is,
and that makes it very easy for this to slide in.
So we're going to go ahead and slide this in right now and then set the rest of
the bucket up. Actually before we throw it in there,
I did want to show you a couple more features of this before we sink it in there
forever. So like I said, there's drainage holes in the bottom of the dirt cups,
which actually act as an ability for the water to come up through,
hit this dirt that will eventually be here and wick upwards.
But also you have drainage holes here. So let's say it rains, it'll,
it'll constantly fill.
So you can top water and then water will drain down into the chamber,
which will be below here through these holes.
And then the holes that are drilled in the bucket itself will help it from
overflowing so you don't have water coming up forever this way.
And then you have a three quarter inch PVC cutout which you do not have to use.
It's optional. And you can throw a PVC tube very similar to my design here.
Mine I believe is a one inch PVC,
but you can use that as well if you want to top fill the water chamber.
So assuming I've cut the edges appropriately,
all I need to do is just pop it down in there and it fits absolutely perfectly
and then we just need to fill it in with water and soil.
The first thing I'm going to do is just fill the dirt cups because they can be a
little hard to fill if you don't do that first because then the water will
actually sit in there and you won't have an opportunity for them to wick.
It'll just kind of have to absorb slowly. So we've got that filled,
the base is filled.
And then what I'm going to do is fill it up with water until it starts coming
out of the side, which means it'll be at the exact point of drainage,
which is where we want it. So
we'll do that and then we'll fill the rest up with water or, sorry,
with soil and we're good to go. So I think I've probably overfilled it,
which is totally fine.
We'll just let the drainage take place and we'll be good to go.
We'll just fill it up with the rest of our soil.
And you do want to make sure you use a high quality potting mix here because it
needs to have some good absorption, water absorption tendencies and qualities,
because otherwise the wicking action simply won't be enough to have it come up
to the top. All the water making its way up to the plant's roots,
which is the entire purpose of this system in the first place.
So I have a little potting mix recipe that I've done right here that's pretty
standard. It's like a one third perlite,
one third peat moss or coconut coir and one third screen compost.
So I have a nice, you know, fine medium.
It's going to be really nice for whatever I end up growing in here.
It'd probably end up being like a lettuce basket or like an herb basket just to
test this method out and see how it works. We'll top it off,
get a little messy with it. It's all good.
We'll water in just slightly and we're going to be in a really good spot to test
this system out.
So we are all filled up with soil.
Now what's interesting about this is it also came with a mulch plate.
So of course you could just use normal mulch if you would like,
but this is pretty neat because already we're getting a lot less watering by
just using the self watering bucket itself, you know.
Water is going to be coming up through here and we're not losing a lot to
evaporation. But what about throwing mulch on top?
There's a lot of benefits to mulch anyways and a mulch plate can be really nice
to keep even more moisture in so you don't have to lose any water at all,
at least not unnecessarily. So I've got a little basil start,
actually two of them right here.
We're going to transplant those right in the middle and then we're going to put
the mulch plate on top just because I do want to test out how this will work in
its entirety. Check those roots out guys. Pretty solid, right?
Okay. I'm going to break this up just slightly.
We'll do that and I'm going to place one right there and I'll place the other
right about there.
We'll cover these up with some nice new potting mix that we've just added and
then we will add the mulch plate.
So I slightly modified the mulch plate.
The circle was right here and I just extended it just a little bit cause I'm
growing two plants and I didn't want to pinch the sensitive stem of this basil
early on in its life. But from there on,
what we can do is just make sure both are in there,
pop this down and we have a very well-protected young basil plant that's going
to get all the water and nutrients it needs without suffering from a lot of the
evaporation, et cetera.
We're basically getting a lot of the benefits of mulch and really low resource
usage. Boom, right there. Pretty cool product. Well there we have it guys.
If you think this is a cool design, definitely let me know in the comments.
Always open to some suggestions.
If you think there's something that could be improved on this, let me know.
I'd love to know that. Um, but honestly I think it's a pretty solid system,
very elegant, very clean. It's basically one part.
You have the dirt plate. I mean this,
this is really the only part that's essential besides the five gallon bucket.
And then of course you have the mulch plate but it's not even required.
You could just use any sort of mulch that you want. Wood chips, straw,
like top cover, top coat, whatever. It doesn't really matter.
So if you like this, definitely let me know. Uh,
I believe he offers these for sale, the dirt plates as well as the full kits.
So I'll leave those in the video description. Like I said,
not sponsored but it's a cool product. So if you want to get your hands on it,
I'll leave those in the notes below.
And let me know what you want to see in the channel guys.
I love doing stuff like this.
I love doing those farm tours that I've been doing. Love doing the tutorials.
So I'm going to try to keep it coming for you guys.
I'm gonna try to keep growing. We've got a couple different designs here,
many more to come.
Some of them actually from the book that's coming out this next spring.
So the plan for the book is to have a really beginner's basic guide to urban
gardening and then different plans, all sorts of different plans,
for how to use and how to build different systems for growing in an urban
environment. That's hydroponics, that's microgreens, that's, you know,
container gardening, raised beds, et cetera.
But what I want to do is I want to extend the book.
I want to put plans out for everything online as well,
so you can follow along with videos and even more pictures and instructions if
you buy the book. So if that's interesting, hit subscribe.
Tell a friend and let me know in the comments, like to respond to everyone.
So good luck in the garden. Keep growing and I'll see you on the next video.
Boop.