Gardening with 5 Gallon Buckets
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Tag Archives: Farm
Toy for Pigs
Cats play with yarn, dogs chase frisbees and parakeets have their mirrors. Like any domesticated animal, pigs need some form of intellectual stimulation.
Many homesteaders recommend giving a pig a bowling ball to push around, but bowling balls are hard to find out in the country! Not only that, but they would probably sink into the mud and be lost forever.
What we do have plenty of on the farm are 5 gallon buckets, and pigs seem to be more than happy to push them around.
Here’s our four pork units, fighting over their new plaything.
Worm Farm
Originally I didn’t want to publish this here because it uses larger 18-gallon bins, but under my new definition of bucket it’s allowed in.
I built my worm farm last winter and stocked it with red worms from our backyard compost bin. It was a successful project, and a great experience, so I’ll probably build another one in my new place soon.
I fed it a very rich food scraps diet for a month or two, then neglected it for four months. When I harvested it, the worms were still alive and happy and the compost they lived in was the richest, sweetest smelling compost I ever laid my nostrils on (and I’ve handled a lot of compost.)
The three-bin worm farm I built is much easier to maintain than a one-bin systems. You can see the full tutorial on DIYwormbin.com
Rainwater Collection
The pacific northwest monsoon season is arriving in my neighborhood. I use the term “neighborhood” loosely, as I’m spending a few weeks living on a sailboat.
Life on the water finds even more uses for buckets than life on shore. On rainy days, just a few catch enough water to meet all my drinking and cooking needs. The water is delicious and clear, unlike our municipal source which has a faint yellow sediment tint this time of year.
The only filter I need is an old t-shirt tied over-top one of the buckets. Its main function is to filter out sand, which is ubiquitous on the boat. In my system, the two open buckets are poured manually into the filter bucket when I need water.
The rains here are aggressive enough that I don’t need a panel to collect enough water, but if I used a clean tarp to increase my collection surface I would have enough water to start a water bottling company! What would you pay for a bottle of fresh, pure, five gallon bucket water?
CSA box
I sell my buckets at cost to a number of farmers in the area, who mainly use them as harvest pails or feed storage. One farmer sends them back to me full of food as part of my CSA subscription.
CSA means “community supported agriculture,” whereby food eaters pay food producers for an entire growing season’s worth of food up front, allowing the farmer to pay for seed and equipment (not to mention rent!) without having to go to a bank for a loan. It also helps offload some of the financial risk from the farmer onto the food eater. This means your farmer will still be farming next year, even if their crop is damaged by pests or drought.
Many CSAs are delivered in rubbermaid totes, which can cost three or four times as much, and do not have a convenient carrying handle!
Sometimes my CSA box comes with a couple inches of water in the bottom, which keeps the leafy greens fresh and alive!