5 Gallon Bucket

DIY tutorials, articles and links. Browse by category in the sidebar, or check out our top 25 posts of all time for a quick overview. We update frequently, so subscribe by email to always get the latest.

Five gallon bucket rock tumbler

polished rocks before after

Have you ever had a beautiful rock you wanted to polish? You don’t need to buy your own polishing machine to do so. Once again, the five gallon bucket can come in handy. There are a number of different designs you can use to create your own rock polisher, depending on the equipment you have available. We’ll look at some of them here

Continue reading

Five Gallon Bug Out Bucket

Sometimes things happen that require you to suddenly leave your house overnight and head elsewhere. It’s common for many people living in remote places to have a bug out bag ready, a bag filled with things they can use if they ever need to leave their house unexpectedly overnight.

DIY Bug Out Bucket cover image

Continue reading

Using five gallon buckets for survival purposes

Sometimes things around us go wrong overnight. When we find ourselves in such a situation, we wish we had prepared better. It’s best to prepare now, now that we still have the means to do so.

Over the years, we’ve shown you a lot of different ways that you can use five gallon buckets to live through potentially catastrophic situations. Here are a few of the most important ones we can recommend to you to check out:

    • Using buckets for long term food storage. This article shows how to store food for extended periods of time and how to make sure the food stays dry. It also gives advice on the type of food you need.
    • Gathering wild oysters with a bucket. This article explains how to gather wild oysters. Oyster reefs are one of the largest most accessible sources of wild animal protein available.
    • Grow a potato farm in buckets. Compared to cereal grains, tubers like potatoes are relatively easy to grow and harvest without complex machinery. They’re ideal to grow when your main priority is survival.
    • Growing sweet potatoes in buckets. Sweet potatoes are similar to regular potatoes, but they’re healthier and prefer warmer climates.
    • Growing Sunchokes in a bucket. This is not just another potato-like crop to grow. Sunchokes contain a form of energy known as Inulin, which is broken down by bacteria in your gut. As a result, sunchokes can be eaten by diabetics as a form of emergency food when they don’t have access to insulin.
    • Growing your own Oyster mushrooms. Growing oyster mushrooms requires you to have some good substrate. If you can get this working, you can produce a lot of food from waste material like sawdust, without needing access to sunlight. You could grow food secretly in your own house, without anyone noticing.
    • How to make an Emergency Water Filter. We recommend buying a portable water filter in advance, but if that’s not an option when things to wrong, you can try building one yourself.
    • Seed Vault. This article explains how to build your own emergency stash of seeds, to sow when you need to rely on food you can grow yourself.
    • DIY Biodiesel. When things go wrong, you may still need a form of transportation, to transport goods. Biodiesel can give you just that and you can produce it yourself at home.

 

 

How to automatically water your plants while you’re on vacation

If you have plants in your house that you want to keep hydrated while you’re on vacation, you could ask someone to enter your house every day to do it for you. Alternatively, you can use a rope or a shoelace. This is called wick watering. It involves making use of the capillary action of a piece of rope, where water can simply crawl upwards.

Look at the principle at work here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJRzuawirbY

All that’s necessary now is to place the rope near a pot with a plant. When you place the rope in the water, it will take a few hours for the rope to begin wicking out the water, so don’t expect to see water dripping immediately.

A good implementation of wick watering plants can be seen here: