My version of the dutch bucket
Hey,
Removing the squash from my hydroponic system earlier today gave me the chance to show you the setup of the buckets I'm using.
For my hydroponic system in the greenhouse I'm using what are generally called dutch buckets. The usual design that I've seen everywhere usually involves a couple of pvc elbows, like in the pic bellow.
I wanted a simpler and cheaper solution, all those elbows add up. I simply drilled through the bottom, added an electrical style grommet (had to soften them under a flame and stretch them out as the only grommets in a reasonable price range were 2 mil narrower than they should have). Cut a short length of pvc water pipe and fit it through the grommet; you can set the level of water the bucket will always hold by pushing the drain pipe up or down.
I added a filter made out of fly window net straight on the little drain pipe but it got stuck quite often. I made a little filter out of a wider pvc pipe and stuck it on top of the drain pipe.
Filling the dutch bucket back up.
Once filled up almost all the way, all it needs is dropping back in the system. The bucket drain pipe just fits through a hole cut in the main drain.
That's about all there is to it.
Thanks.
Cos
(source is a dodgy page found through google image search - http://mp4music.net/search/Dutch%20Bucket%20Hydroponic%20Tomatoes%20%20%20Lessons%20Learned%20and%20a%20New%20Crop )
Great pics. That is an impressive set up.
Thanks
Congratulations @costopher! You have completed some achievement on Steemit and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
Click on any badge to view your own Board of Honnor on SteemitBoard.
For more information about SteemitBoard, click here
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPIf you want to support the SteemitBoard project, your upvote for this notification is welcome!
You are quite literally using buckets now. Glad to see some hydroponic enthousiasts, followed you.
Any luck with strawberries? I had some growing but they don't taste so good as soil ones
Buckets are great for this sort of growing, hence the huge variation on the dutch bucket systems and my approach in general is 'the simpler, the better'. Thanks for the follow. I haven't tried strawberries hydroponically yet, I've only finished my greenhouse a couple of months ago. I'm growing some strawberries outside in a water pipe filled with some soil, I do feed them my spent nute solution weekly when I change my reservoir; they will be moved in my hydro system next season, started building my pipe system for it already.
About the taste, it's all about the nutrients, I know you're growing aquaponically and don't really have the flexibility you would have in a pure hydro system when it comes to controlling the nutes, I don't know if there are any that would play well with your fish.
I like your dutch bucket!!
Gives me some ideas :)