5 gallon bucket projects?

Chicken Feeder
Cat food bin/dispenser

http://s120.photobucket.com/albums/o...0789Medium.jpg

make a cool hat and learn to play like buckethead

make solar bucket luminaries
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/10/08/...ects-sunshine/


store garden hoses/extension cords
worm farm
compost bin

Make a "git and go" bucket for each member of your family. You can cover with plastic and duct tape. Right now we are filling them with Black Walnuts. A friend saves us a lot. DH made hooks and hung ours from the rafters in our shed. They are out of the way and he made me a long pole with a hook on the end to get them down if I need one. (Someone is always 'borrowing' one.) Another good item is plastic gallon jars. A friend saves them for us from school. Grocery delis and restaurants usually will be glad for you to take them off their hands. Especially if you agree to wash them out!

stack them in a zig-zag pattern below an eves and they will all fill with water if it rains where you live.

Store horse poop in them, then after they harden use them for heat fuel.
no, I just made that up

A bench,two buckets attach a good wide board,cut a place in the middle to carry it.DH made one back in the summer,its handy for the yard or around the house.

If you're plagued by toddlers, they can make a pretty good toddler trap.

toddler trap lol

Your already ahead of the rest if you were to start a tree and shrub nursery. The cost for potting containers is a large part of the overhead.
I cut the bottom out of them and use them over a post hole that I'm pouring concrete in. Run a piece of rebar down through to support it. I've raised the steel post up out of the muck to avoid rusting.

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That which is tolerated by the first generation is magnified in the next.

CIW

Upside-down Tomato Planter

You might like this use

Well, we picked up about 250 of them yesterday. Total cost - less than $1.00 worth of gasoline to get there and back. $0.004 each. And we also got two really nice, heavy duty livestock buckets and at least a dozen square milk crates.

Throughout the day yesterday visions of container gardens kept swirling in our heads. We usually do some container - about 80 2-gallon nursery pots of tomatoes and peppers. But next year instead of trying again to get our two front yard vegetable gardens established we will switch those over to containers instead. We've had all sorts of trouble with downpour washouts and hard baking on those two beds and were going to put raised beds in there instead. Not now - we'll just put our bucket farm there.


Gardening in general has been a bit of a battle here. Our two back gardens are really good, as is our current back of the garage container garden. But we live in an area where the normal weather is "it's not usually like this" and in 5 years have had the summer where the sun never came out, then two years of drought, summer temperatures from nice to scorching, and occasional multi-day hard freezes in May and October. I think we will be able to extend our actual growing season by about two months with the buckets, and it may be the only way to get a good crop in the washout/scorch years.

Now that we have this many buckets, and the potential for a near endless supply of additional ones in the future, we are going to get a bunch of soft fruit plants started next year and then propagate them until we never need to even think about buying fruit from a store again. We have a giant compost heap already and our lovely cow Connie (only two years old) can always be counted on for a full 5 gallon pail of top notch cow pies for us to pick up in the back yard. (I can only imagine how many buckets full she's depositing on the hills and in the forests on the rest of the 15 acres. )

I could hardly sleep last night with the excitement of having all of the free containers, and all of the free high quality garden mix (except for buying some perlite to mix in).

Have any of you all ever grown peanuts in 5 gallon buckets? We'd love to give that a try next year as well.


Lynda

Keep half a dozen or so free and handy to the garden for when you're picking tomatoes, beans, cukes, etc. I'm always and forever looking for a good container to hold produce while I pick it.

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Our homestead-in-the-making: Palazzo Rospo
Eating the dream

I also use one to bring in wood from the outside for the woodburner.

It catches all the dirt and stuff and if your logs aren't too long, the handle works great still.


And I forgot that I did make a chicken feeder 10 years ago - it's still going strong. Cut some triangles out of the bucket towards the bottom of the bucket and attach a feed pan (metal) to the bottom with bolts and washers.

Works great and you can hang it from the rafters so the chickens don't get down inside (they tend to anyway). I didn't make a "gravity cone" for inside the bucket and it worked well.

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Radically conservatively un-biased liberal.

http://whitepinesoapworks.com/

I remember years ago my dad drove re-rod down into the ground and put opened ended barrels, welded one to another vertically in columns, over them. Filled them with concrete and such and used them for pilings on either side of the ditch for the base of the bridge across the ditch. It lasted many many years.

Buckets would do the same for a footbridge...

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Radically conservatively un-biased liberal.

http://whitepinesoapworks.com/

Drill holes in them all over, put your produce in them, wash, and then grab the handle and use yourself as the center of the centrifugal spin to dry. Or let them air-dry. (make a sieve)



mongo minnow buckets...

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Radically conservatively un-biased liberal.

http://whitepinesoapworks.com/

dh is a house painter, I keep a few 5 gal paint buckets around but because we have so many he ends up burning most of them. I never really gave any thought to what could be done with them. I think Im going to try the floating pond thing I have been wanting him to build an island in ours for the geese.

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Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right.

GIVE to the citiots and ask for a donation?

that better?

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Radically conservatively un-biased liberal.

http://whitepinesoapworks.com/

You'd be supprised at how many of them Home Depot sells

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If the grass looks greener it is probably over the septic tank. - troy n sarah tx

Our existance here is soley for the expoitation of CMG