You take your 2 gallon bucket and drill a series of more or less evenly spaced 1/4 inch holes about 2 inches up from the bottom. Four to six holes is enough. This provides drainage and root aeration and a little bit of a reservoir. For feeding, I use a mix of miracle grow for tomatoes and epsom salts, (four parts Miracle Grow to one part epsom salts). For new starts I only use about a quarter tsp of this mix to a gallon of water and increase as the plant grows up to a max of about one tsp per gallon. You just pour enough of it into the bucket until it starts running out of the drainage holes. The plants don't necessarily need to be fed every day, I feed mine every other day and just use well water on the other days. When you fill the buckets with mulch, go ahead and wet the mulch down with the fertilizer solution a few weeks before you plan on planting in order for the mulch to become moist through capillary action. Note that I chose smaller varieties because I wanted to use two gallon containers, but you could use five gallon containers if you wish, for larger plants, just drill the holes higher up on the bucket so that you have about 6 or 7 inches from the holes to the top of the bucket. I know this all sounds pretty fiddly, but once you have your buckets set up and filled with mulch it's just a matter of watering/feeding a few minutes a day. The reason I use this method is that the soil in SW Florida is very poor and is infested with nematodes. It is almost impossible to grow any kind of vegetable crop in the soil without fumigating the soil and using all kind of chemicals that can only be purchased with a pesticide license. Note: Try to buy pure cypress mulch if you can, if not you can use the blended stuff, but I don't think it is quite as good. Another plus to this method is that you won't be having to weed as the mulch is free of weed seeds.
