Teaching Sustainability with Two Buckets
By Sara Laimon M
ODERN AGRIBUSINESS HAS accustomed us to buy almost any fruit or vegetable whenever we want. Finding bananas from Ecuador in the middle
of winter is as natural as finding fresh seafood in the middle of the country. The closest that many young people get to the origins of the food on their dinner table is at the local grocery store. Being so far removed from agricultural operations, it is hard for them to truly appreciate the complex web of processes and relationships that brings food to their table. By contrast, a sustainable food system encourages local
production and distribution, and ensures that nutritious food is affordable and accessible to all. Further, it is a humane and just system that protects farmers and other workers, consumers and communities. Our food system is complex, woven with many interrelated parts, and best understood through systems thinking. It is much easier for students to visualize and appreciate food systems when they have opportunities to study an actual system. At Environmental Charter High School, we knew
we needed a project that would help our students develop a more realistic view of the food system while teaching important concepts of sustainability, permaculture, and systems thinking. The project we developed is a system using two buckets to grow food. It has provided us with a practical, hands-on learning opportunity that gets our stu- dents outside. While our container gardens are much smaller than that of a traditional school food garden, they are large enough to provide an effective context for learning. In this article, I will describe how to build this self-
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watering container system and suggest some related activi- ties and experiments you can use with your students. While we worked with high school students, this system can easily be adapted for use with lower grades. In our system, two buckets are stacked together. The
inner top bucket holds the soil and the plant, while the outer bottom bucket holds the water. The water is delivered to the plant through a wicking system that draws the water up to the plant roots only when needed. Much less water is needed than for a traditional garden—and very little is lost to evap- oration. (Water is added to the bottom bucket occurs every 1-2 weeks through a tube.) With no weeding, it requires little effort to maintain. It can be built quickly and economically with cheap or recycled materials. It is portable, does not take up a lot of space, and can be re-used year after year. And many people have found that container systems produce more vegetables than can be grown in comparable-sized spaces in traditional gardens. Many types of vegetables, herbs or flowers can be
grown in our bucket containers, but tomatoes grow espe- cially well. Your own choices will be dependent on your personal preferences, the season, your local climate and the length of time you can devote to this project. Whenever possible, allow students to choose what to plant, so that they will have more ownership over their project. Growing a salad or pizza garden with these container systems can be fun. Obtain specific planting and harvesting time informa- tion for your area and avoid plants that are root intensive or like watermelons, don’t lend themselves to container gar- dening. And to increase efficiency, we recommend planting seedlings rather than seeds.
GREEN TEACHER 89
Environmental Charter High School
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