For anyone curious to solve the mystery of its undescriptive name, the first buckets were invented by a now defunct Dutch company in 1989 that decided to grow roses in a perlite mixture instead of soil on an indoor farm so as to grow roses all year round and to decrease waste and necessary input to grow.

American inventors several years later further tweaked the design and coopted the new and improved device for the burgeoning hydroponics movement. For what it’s worth, no one at Urban Vine Co. could find the etymology for the word “bato.” That remains a mystery even to us.