[JRinPA]

I just washed my hands from resetting my rain gutter buckets for the year.

I dumped the old out into the wheelbarrow for each bucket, then discard any top stuff with roots and the packed cup and bottom screen contents. Discard will go to compost pile. That leaves about 3/4 of the contents. With my coffee can scoop (~30 oz maxwell house blue plastic) I added 1 scoop finished compost, 1 scoop perlite, 1 scoop peat, a tablespoon of lime and a 2 tbsp of 10-10-10. Mix that up with a rake. Separately I mixed 50/50 peat and perlite for the wick and wet that well to pack the wick tight. This is the most perlite I have used. With wick in, I laid the screen back in (I use window screen atop the wick) and repacked the bucket most of the way. Then I set in the peppers and eggplant and laid a ring of 10-10-10 around the top rim, covered with a little more compost, and that was it. It did take a good 2-3 hours to redo the 18 buckets but it was straightforward.

At this point I must be approaching 20%-25% perlite in the mix. It always works great. I haven't done horse manure since the 2nd year, and last June I think I repacked about the same way as I did today. If I was starting new ones today, I would not hesitate to start them just like I repacked today at 1/3 each peat/perlite/compost as the main mix.

By the fall and last harvest, the mix drops down from the rim to about 1-1.5" lower. That is when I remove buckets and dump move the gutter for the winter. I replace the pots on the stand and add shredded leaves on top to protect the soil for winter. End of February, it is compacted a bit more. I scrape off the leaves, throw lettuce and spinach seed there, and replace a 1/2" or so of leaves. Those are easy, no work starts. They come up when they come up, natural like. This year they were up well by end of March, but then stalled. It was very dry and then hot and now finally wet but cool. The spinach didn't do much there after April except want to bolt so I dug many of them for transplants, but the lettuce took off fine and we have had a lot of cut lettuce from there. (EDIT: my point is this is an easy way to start lettuce and spinach for transplanting by heavily seeding the bucket and thinning them out by transplanting elsewhere. To transplant just dig out the start and the chunk of soil under it and put it in the new spot with more room. Can probably do other cool weather crops as well. The buckets heat up sooner than the ground.)

This evening's 2-3 hours is the only real work needed for the year for those buckets - that is what I really like about them. I picked up some float controlled drippers that I mounted on 5 gal buckets so all I have to do this summer is ferry water 20 feet from the rain barrel to the 5 gal fill buckets and throw in some mosquito bits every couple weeks for good measure. I will string up the peppers and eggplant but that needs done the same anywhere.

I've still never tried tomatoes in buckets though...I planted something like 106 tomatoes in the ground and I can't see messing with a good thing.