Five gallon bucket tip
The bigest downside to using 5
gallon buckets for
hauling mulch is when two buckets get stuck together.
One easy way to avoid this is
to carry a bundle of twigs to use as spacers.
I can remember being on a
construction job site and needing to separate two buckets that were
hopelessly married to each other. A co-worker held one end while I
pulled on the other. After about 5 minutes of struggle we decided to
stop trying to recreate a scene from the 3 stooges and threw the
buckets in a dumpster.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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One way to solve it is to squirt some compressed air between the buckets. They'll pop apart.
If you're not using the buckets for liquids, you can also drill a small hole in the bottom.
Zimmy --- we got three truckloads of chips from a utility company a few years ago, and it broke down into the most awesome mulch. Sadly, I've nearly used it all and didn't find them again to get another batch composting. I need to work out some logistics to let users post photos, but I think it's a great idea if the technical side works!
Roland --- I was wondering where you were! We missed you over the last week and a half and I was going to email you. Good bucket solutions! We do use the buckets for liquids sometimes, but the compressed air would be a great way to fix stuck buckets.
Buckets are usually conical in shape. This makes it possible to take them out of the mold they are made in and it makes it possible to stack them. However, when you press two buckets into each other, you'll drive out the air and the conical surfaces will form a pretty good seal. If the buckets are wet, the seal will be even better. So you have to either prevent this seal from forming (sticks!) or break the seal with pressurized air or water or by drilling a hole in the bottom.
Air pressure (or the lack of it) is very powerful. At work I made a vacuum press for sandwich panels by bonding a rubber membrane to a steel frame and then bonding some seals on the frame. When this contraption was placed over a 93"x23" panel that was lying on a table and the air evacuated with a pump (to .3 bar absolute pressure), the outside air compresses the sandwich panel with a force of 20000 lb! It's a very easy method for applying pressure to parts that need to be bonded.