Grow a Potato Farm in Buckets

If you had to, you could live on almost nothing but potatoes. That’s made them one of the most important crops in human history. Entire civilizations would not have existed without them. And you can grow this powerful food crop in a 5 gallon bucket.

potatoes grown in a 5 gallon bucketThere’s a trick to growing high potato yields. As the potatoes grow, continue piling soil onto the plants. This forces the plants to supercharge their root growth to keep up. Those roots are what we call potatoes. Now you know why potatoes are grown in hills.

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1 Minute Bread Machine Recipe

The moment we got our first bread machine was the moment my life changed forever.

Bread machines perform 21st century alchemy. Just stick about 50 cents worth of ingredients into it, go away for a few hours, and BOOM! A 5 dollar loaf of hot fresh bread is waiting for you. Thanks Taran from Dollar Eater for finding the per-loaf cost for us.

1-minute-bread-machine-recipe

However! Bread machines have one major flaw – few people know how to use them to make adequate bread. Getting our first bread machine to make good bread was an exercise in frustration and dismay. For months we tried recipe after recipe, always ending up with the same thing – a burnt brick of rock-hard particle board.

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Chicken Egg Washer


Update:
If you are a serious egg producer, please also check out our hands-on review of The Little Egg Scrubber egg washing machine.


Back yard chickens are phenomenal – feed them waste from their kitchen and they in turn feed you fresh eggs daily. But when you catch the “chicken bug” in a big way, you’ll end up with so many eggs that just washing them turns into an hour long chore.

A bucket based egg washer is ideal for someone who washes several dozen at a time. The egg washer we built for this article will fit 70 of the golden-centered orbs at a time.

The basic premise is simple – air is blown through holes in a submerged pipe resting at the bottom of a standard bucket. The air flows upward through the bucket in the form of bubbles, which agitate the dirt off the eggs.
bucket-egg-washer The commercial version of this egg washer pictured above sells for a burly $135 on Amazon. The DIY version we built below cost us about 30$ in parts.

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Grain Thresher

When wheat, barley, or other grains are harvested, the grain must be separated from the rest of the plant before it can be used to make flour. This separation is called threshing. In the agriculture of today, threshing is done with massive machines called combines.

As you probably have figured out by now, you can make your own ultra-cheap thresher with a 5 gallon bucket.

wheat-kernals-in-hand

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