Beat food inflation with a bucket garden

April Eli gives her daughter Bailey a hand shoveling dirt as they build a bucket garden at a recent Okanagan Regional Library workshop at West Kelowna's Jackalope Farms

Whether or not you have a yard, fresh produce can be as close as your doorstep or balcony with a bucket garden, an inexpensive beginner garden project.

Young and old recently spent the morning at Jackalope Farms in West Kelowna learning to make a bucket garden through an Okanagan Re­gional Library program. 


Participants assembled two bucket gardens – one to take home and one to donate to the Metis Community Services of B.C.


Bucket gardens are an easy and inexpensive way to grow food. They are moveable, need less bending over to care for and there is no digging or tilling. 


All people need is a five-gallon bucket and lid, PVC pipe, an old T-shirt, soil and three plants. 


Some of the refill stores in Kelowna donate the buckets their stock arrives in to be repurposed, so there is an opportunity to get a free bucket for gardening. 


Once they have planted their gardens, people can put the bucket outside their door or on their balcony. It doesn't take up much space. 


"For people who have never gardened before this is a good start. You just concentrate on caring for those three plants. It's simple because it's right outside your door," said Lois Beischer, with the Okanagan Regional Library, who was teaching the bucket garden workshop. 


Beischer gave participants tips such as planting the tomato deeper so more roots come out, making the plant stronger in the long run.


The tomato and the cucumber plants will produce multiple fruit, while the lettuce is continuous harvest, so the bucket gardens will provide multiple salads throughout the summer. 


Beischer warned people to pinch off the lettuce to harvest and not pull out the entire plant. Gardeners water the bucket garden through the tube. The water wicks up through the T-shirt to the bottom of the soil.

Normally, having soil dry out too fast is a concern when growing plants in containers; however, the reservoir at the bottom of the bucket is perfect for keeping the soil moist in the Okanagan's intense heat. 


Although the three starter-sized plants look small when they are planted in the bucket, they will bush out as they grow. 


While participants in the bucket garden workshop planted a tomato, a cucumber and lettuce, people can plant other vegetables such as peas, beans, radishes and Swiss chard. This was the first time Sabeena Butt had made a bucket garden.


"I love gardening and I want to learn everything," she said, adding she also liked the idea of planting a garden bucket to donate. 
She usually plants her vegetable garden in a raised bed.


After taking last year off gardening be­cause her husband was ill, Butt is getting back into the practice.

"I am really happy that I found this op­tion," she said.

Shelley Purdon brought her five-year-old neighbour, Noel, to the workshop so the child could learn to grow food to feed herself.

As a senior living alone in the community, Purdon said the workshop was also an opportunity to connect with somebody younger. 


"I think food security going forward is good for everybody," she said. "I think playing in the dirt is fun."


April Eli, brought her daughter, Bailey, 4, to the workshop so the girl could see where food comes from and learn to care for her own garden. 


Bailey was happily chatting about looking forward to eating tomatoes and lettuce. 
Just as gardens grow and change, so has Jackalope Farms, where the workshop took place.

Jackalope Farms had been a local strawberry you-pick until 2019 when a fungal infection killed all the strawberry plants. 
Serina Penner of Jackalope Farms turned the disaster into an opportunity to create a space that was better than before, sharing her farmland and fostering the love of gardening.

"I noticed that when we were doing the you-pick farm, the kids that came were just ecstatic and they were having a wonderful time," she said. Seeing families picking strawberries together and the children allowed to run around freely and eat gave Penner the seed of an idea for children's farm camps. 


Penner, an educator in the Central Okanagan School District, has done her masters of education focussing on how to build social and emotional competencies in kids through gardening. 


"Time spent in nature is a huge advantage for kids," Penner said. "It helps them to self-regulate and it also helps them to have a safe space to explore themselves and the world around them."


Penner has run successful farm camps the past few summers in partnership with the City of West Kelowna. Along with weeding, the kids learn about composting, bees and beekeeping as well as how to plant a garden, read seed packages and harvest appropriately. 


All the food the kids harvest during the week-long camp goes to the food bank, so they get the experience of learning how to give back to the community. The camps give kids an opportunity to learn as they get dirty in the garden.


"You’d be shocked how many kids can't recognize a tomato plant," she said. Penner began to share farm space with Incredible Edible Okanagan to grow food for families in need as well as doing land partnerships with different farmers. "Our goal is always to supply local food banks through the produce that's grown." Penner maintains a section for farming for profit and sells to a local winery as a way to maintain the farm programs.


For Penner, the best part about the changes at Jackelope Farms is seeing kids identify a vegetable such as a zucchini they’ve seen in the grocery store growing on a plant. "It blows their minds," she said. 
Even seeing kids digging up a potato with their hands is rewarding.


"It's pure joy on their faces," she said. 


Learning to grow your own food is important as the pandemic has shown food security is a big issue, she said. 
Gardening is also relaxing hobby. 


"Spending time in nature is calming," said Penner. 
Once people have acquired a love of gardening and would like more space, they can put their name in to rent a plot at a community garden, said Beischer.

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