What Are Space Buckets? The Art of Stealth Growing

If you’re a fan of home-grown cannabis and DIY projects, then you can’t go wrong with space buckets! A space bucket is a modified plastic bucket that acts as a fully self-sufficient growing vessel for growing small amounts of cannabis for personal use. With space buckets, you don’t have to give up your closet or bathroom to generate bountiful harvests of your favorite bud. Instead of investing the space and finances into a large grow room, you can go miniature and set up a micro-environment inside a simple plastic bucket.

This discreet, inexpensive, and compact growing method is a perfect project for growing your own cannabis supply. To get started, explore this guide that will provide information about how space buckets work and what key growing equipment you will need to make a space bucket of your very own.

What Are Space Buckets?

Space buckets are DIY indoor gardens made from plastic containers. By attaching proper lighting and airflow appliances to a sealable plastic vessel, you can create an enclosed growth chamber suitable for growing small cannabis plants. It acts as a small, self-contained growing environment that you can customize to provide optimal conditions for a healthy plant.

The system within a space bucket condenses all the essential elements found in a large grow room into a compact, storable, moveable, and discreet container. A typical space bucket consists of at least one bucket with a lid, a couple of fans, and grow lights. This versatile system contains everything your plant will need to thrive, and you can customize your growing equipment or bucket size to suit the needs of your particular plant variety of choice. With a couple of buckets, the right tools, and a few hours of DIY assembly, you will have a self-sufficient system ideal for producing cannabis at home. 

Advantages of Using Space Buckets

There are a number of potential benefits and advantages of using a space bucket setup, including:

• Increased Environmental Control: Since a space bucket creates a self-contained micro-environment, you have very precise control over the conditions for growing your plant. You can easily experiment with different nutrients in the soil, brighten the lights, or raise the humidity, depending on whatever growth conditions you’d like to try out.
• Protecting your Plant: In the sealed space of your space bucket container, there is less risk that pests and other microbes will infest and cause damage to your plant or product. 
• Compact and Discreet: Probably the most attractive benefit of growing with space buckets is that they take up very little space, making them especially ideal for apartments (that allow cannabis on the property), closets, or garages. An empty corner in your closet, or even a small area beneath a kitchen sink, can make perfect spots for stealth-growing cannabis in a space bucket. 
• Price: Compared to larger growing systems, space buckets are relatively cheap to make. A fully-equipped grow room can cost thousands of dollars to set up, but the simple space bucket can cost as little as $100 to put together. Many items you’ll need are uncomplicated and easily obtainable at a hardware store or online, and you may even already have some of the materials around the house to recycle into your space bucket construction.
• Saving Energy: While a larger full-closet growing operation can call for hundreds of watts of power, a space bucket can do a lot with far less lighting. This is because the inside of the bucket reflects most of the light fixture’s output back to the plant, so you get efficient use of your light source. Some “bucketeers” have even found success using just 100 watts of LED or compact fluorescent lighting.
• Adjustable: Your space bucket may need to be adapted to suit the needs of a new plant, or maybe you’ll want to upgrade the lights or fans. The space bucket makes performing adjustments easy, as every element of the space bucket system can be removed or replaced at any time. A larger growing operation requires more work and cost to upgrade, comparatively.

Disadvantages of Space Buckets

Although this grow environment offers many benefits, there are a few drawbacks to be aware of before setting up your system.

• Little Room for Error: Minor mistakes with your growing technique or with the space bucket setup can be disastrous for your plant. A small oversight or mechanical malfunction that could be easily identified and addressed in an extended grow room could quickly kill your plant in a little bucket. So, it is recommended that you test your system and equipment setup before starting your plants in the space bucket. 
• Aroma: Even though space buckets are considered a stealthy approach to growing your own cannabis plant, they do not contain the smell very effectively (without more complicated modifications). 
• Produces Smaller Yields: This is not a problem if you are only looking to grow a small plant for moderate personal use. Generally, cannabis plants grown in space buckets have to be on the small side in order to thrive in a bucket in the first place. Plus, you can’t expect one little bucket to deliver the kinds of yields you’d get from a closet or tent housing multiple plants. So, if you want a heftier harvest of bud, a space bucket might not meet your preferences.

Space Bucket Basic Equipment

There are numerous guides to be found online about the full process of building space buckets and an entire online community of helpful “bucketeers” to help you get started on your project. Here are some of the basic elements you will need to create your micro-environment: 

• Lighting: Light is a vital resource for your plants and one of the most important elements of your space bucket. Not enough light will create unstable, spindly, undesirable plants. Too much light can overheat or damage your plant. Usually, light sources are installed at the lid of the space bucket, with the most common lighting solutions being compact fluorescent bulbs or LED bulbs. 
• Ventilation: All indoor gardens need proper air circulation to keep temperature and humidity problems in check. Fans like PC fans or inline fans protect the plants from being damaged by the heat generated from your light source. They also ensure that your plant can access fresh CO2 to breathe. At least 2 fans should be enough for a simple 5-gallon bucket. 
• Container: And, of course, there’s the bucket itself. You can go for the most compact method and use a 5-gallon bucket (it is not recommended that you go any smaller than this), but if you want a bit more of a bulky stealth growing operation, you can stack and attach multiple buckets, or use a larger plastic storage bin for your space bucket.

Tips for Growing Cannabis in Space Buckets

As you begin assembling your space bucket setup, the following tips can help you prepare for success.

• Select small plants: Make sure the plants you are using in your space bucket are smaller varieties of cannabis plants, otherwise, they could outgrow the bucket. Consider planting Indica strains or even auto-flowering cannabis seeds to keep your plants on the small side, as Sativa stains tend to produce taller plants. 
• Optimize lighting: To optimize your lighting efficiency and distribution, it is often recommended that you coat the inside of the bucket with a reflective surface, like mylar film, especially if you are not using a white bucket. This allows more of your light to reflect back at the cannabis plant. Some people have even lined the reflective sides of their buckets with LED strips to effectively supply their plants with light.
• Use a pot: Instead of planting your cannabis plant directly in the bucket itself, keep your plant in a separate grow pot to place in the bucket. This way, you can easily remove your plant to check on it if there are any issues. This also makes it easier to swap out the plant if something does go wrong or if you just want to try out a different plant in your microenvironment. 

Are Space Buckets Legal? 

Every state has different laws about growing cannabis at home, so make sure you are familiar with local laws before you embark on your endeavor to craft the perfect space bucket. States like California, Hawaii, Colorado, and Massachusetts allow residents over the age of 21 to cultivate recreational cannabis for personal use. On the other hand, there are states such as Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that do not even allow medical patients to cultivate cannabis plants. 

Also, if you live in federally-funded housing or other shared housing establishments whose lease terms do not permit cannabis possession, you should not attempt to grow cannabis within your dwelling. Even if you have a medical card, cannabis is still a federally illegal substance, and property managers can deny reasonable accommodation requests by medical cannabis patients because users of illegal drugs are disqualified from legal protections that prohibit housing discrimination, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Fair Housing Act (FHA). Moreover, federally-funded low-income housing properties are even required to deny housing to cannabis users. So, overall, if you are a renter, you must be cautious about what is or isn’t allowed by your management before attempting to build a space bucket.

And finally, there is no legal way to sell your own homegrown cannabis. It is illegal to sell your cannabis without the proper licensing in any state in the US, so use your space bucket to grow a stash for personal use to avoid breaking the law.