by Nebula Haze
What grower doesn’t want a “set and forget” cannabis growing system? A hempy bucket doesn’t get you all the way there (check out our tutorial for cannabis automated watering systems for that), but it does make it so you have to water your cannabis plants waaaaay less often.
Hempy buckets let you water less often!
A “hempy bucket” is a proven cannabis-growing variation that sets up a reservoir of water that your plants can drink from as they grow. As a result, you need to water your plants less often. Growers may be able to go a week or more between waterings. But since roots are anchored in a bed of soil, and the water reservoir is located in a bed of perlite or hydroton, plants are much less likely to develop root rot than if grown sitting in a pool of water. And since you’re still watering plants every week or two, that gives you the ability to control what nutrients your plants are getting so you can give nutrients in the flowering stage to increase overall bud size.
The blue arrows in this picture point to holes in the bucket on the sides near the bottom of this hempy bucket by Nyce. These holes are key to the hempy bucket method. Water can only drain out through these holes. That means if you’re seeing runoff, you know the space underneath the holes is filled with a reservoir of water.
You can make a hempy bucket for growing cannabis just by drilling holes about 2″ above the bottom of the bucket around the sides. Fill with expanded clay pebbles up to the holes, then fill the rest of the way with your regular soil or coco coir. Whenever you water your plants, you will be giving them reservoir of water to draw from at the bottom of the hempy bucket.
Here’s an example of a modified 5-gallon Hempy bucket sent in by one of our readers with this note: 3″ modified hempy bucket reservoir with clay pebbles, 4-1 ratio of Perlite to Coco, 2″ PVC fill tube.
Want a made-for you version of a hempy bucket?
These Earthboxes are like a hempy bucket, but on steroids. It gives you a much better pot than your standard bucket, giving your plant roots tons of room to expand. This lets you grow really big cannabis plants, and is well suited to outdoor growing. It also puts your plants on wheels, which makes it easier to move your plants around. This helps you ensure plants get the most sun each day, and also gives you more options to protect plants from heat or rain (you can just move the plants under shelter).
We haven’t used an Earthbox ourselves yet, but our readers love them!
Here is a recent note we received from one of our newsletter readers:
A quick pic from one of the current grows. Left is Chemical Romance (D42) and right is Girl Scout Monkeys (D60). Both re autoflowers from Mephisto Genetics. Growing with all organic inputs, in living soil in Earthboxes. I’m loving the auto flowers and the living soil/organic growing.
~Cosmo Stardrive
