needrain said: 
@coryvp
I'd like to see a photo of those buckets if you can manage it! And, for my own info, what is a 'food-grade bucket'? Are regular paint buckets not food-grade? What makes one not food-grade? Might not matter if they aren't used for food, I guess, but I don't know the difference. 
If the tomato plants thrive, that sounds like a good way to grow them. You could get them going earlier and keep them protected from a late frost and maybe protect them from excessive heat by moving them around after it gets really hot in the summer. Also, they shouldn't have nematodes or soil diseases grown that way, would they?
Hi there! I got food-grade since some plastics aren't safe to use for things like food storage (probably through leaching of chemicals), and I was concerned that the plants may take up some of the chemicals from the plastic in non-food grade and get into the fruit. I'm not even sure if that would happen, but I did it just to be on the safe side. The Tractor Supply buckets have food-grade labels on them, and the plain white buckets at Walmart do as well (and they're cheaper there). The Home Depot buckets, at least the ones I'd bought previously, are labeled food-grade.
I went with the bucket experiment because last year's garden was a disaster with the insane weed growth, insects, and disease mainly due to all the record rainfall we had. I expected a similar rainy spring this year, so I decided to try to head off those problems. The weeds grew right around the weed barrier I had last year, so this time I laid plastic sheeting down to fix that problem, then lined the buckets up on top with plant support coming from wire strung between T-posts. I used straw in the buckets for mulch and have drip irrigation on a timer. I'm even growing pumpkins in buckets (actually they're "squashkins", which was an accidental cross between Howden pumpkin and straightneck yellow squash in 2012, and I'm growing them out each year looking for a stable new pumpkin). I still have some tomatoes, peppers, and squashkins in buckets on the porch that I need to put out in another plot.
Here's a pic of my setup:
