I loved their ideas so much that I set out to combine the fashionista's homemade grow bags with their global bucket system. I shared the details of that success on their website. First, I used the $2 pickle buckets I scored from Firehouse Subs to plant tomato seeds in late January/early February. G, its too cold even in South Carolina for tomato seeds to germinate in winter. Not if you use the winter sowing method. Trudi Davidoff developed a method for sowing your spring seeds outside in perforated covered containers (wintersown.org). They stay wet from condensation and germinate when they're ready. The bonus is that there's no need to harden off your plants because they've been exposed to the elements all winter long. Colleen Vanderlinden has a great article on the subject. In our backyard, Our system used plastic water bottles with the lids cut off (and then scored with a knife in several places) to give the tomato seeds the desired environment. Anyway, after the tomato seeds started to germinate, I covered them with new water bottles with the caps off as a sort of mini cloche.
We salvaged a discarded footlocker to produce the second global bucket style system in our yard. Along with those pics I'm including more photos of our homemade grow bags in action. Since I couldn't get the lid off the footlocker, I used cardboard, newspaper and scraps of plastic chicken wire to craft a makeshift bed for squash plants that grew in our greenhouse.