Let's go Swimming the Larry Zoro Way

I should get about eight buckets of plants in this pool. These are all strawberry plants. I bought two white strawberry plant today at the Amish store for just $1.59 ea.

I know people buy kiddy pools for growing. You can cut the bottom out of your buckets and fill the pool and buckets with soil. I do it differently.  I use a 6" PVC and layer straw around the PVC before filling the PVC with soil and pulling the PVC out. It doesn't take much soil and the holes at the bottom of the bucket sucks up the water from the pool.

I paid $9.88 at Wal-Mart for the pool. I could envision all my gardening from buckets in small swimming pools. As much as I like hay bale gardening, my bucket technique works as well as my bales in trenches.

I can't wait to show everyone my cardboard garden. I plan to grow in cardboard just to prove that with the right soil medium you can grow in anything.

I went on-line and looked at some bottom watering systems with 5 gallon buckets. I just can't see the extra expense in making them.

If for some reason you are not getting enough moisture with my system, you can prime your buckets with a cup of water that you scoop up from the pool. Only put a few inches of water in your pool. It is better to dry out than breed mosquitoes.

When it comes time to mow the grass underneath the pool, it's simple. Pull out the light buckets and move the pool.

My buckets are light because I use half straw or hay and soil in the middle and on the top. I couldn't believe how I did not find any straw in the buckets from last year. The hay disintegrated and I was able to reuse the same soil with new bio-char. You can always add a little fertilizer, that's what straw bale gardeners do.

Straw bale gardeners are just fluff and bluff. They use fertilizer and bone meal and then give credit to the straw for growing great plants. Hay and straw is great for compost or helping in wicking up the water to the plants but besides that, it all show.

The thing I like about my system is that it using little watering and not much soil. I have heaps of top soil just waiting to be used.

I did need some soil for my buckets so I used the soil from my decomposed garden trenches where I used to have strawberry plants. The soil is so rich with worms and compost that I find gardening with last years hay bales, now decomposed, very beneficial soil medium.

This is Larry Zoro; make sure you buy all my books on gardening, watch my videos, and read all my posts. For a few measly bucks you can have all my secrets in growing your dream garden. I spent more today on plants than what my books costs on Amazon. My techniques will save you more money than what they costs.