Buckets

Then I started getting the buckets ready. I read a lot about self-watering container gardening, such as instructions from Earthbox, which you can find here, as well as from other places online, like here and here.

I put an ad on Craigslist for 5 gallon food grade buckets and got a bunch of responses. I wanted to pay $1-2 per bucket, which I thought was reasonable. You can also call bakeries and many of them will just give you their old buckets. One thing I would recommend: if you pay for buckets, only buy clean buckets. Scrubbing out chocolate or cherry pie filling from plastic buckets is not fun and takes away from what you want to be doing, which is gardening.

Another thing to watch for is that some buckets are 5 gallon and some are 4.3 gallon. If you're going to do tomatoes I've read that you should use the full 5 gallon.

I think I ended up with about 50 buckets in all.