How To Garden in a Bucket - A Portable, Private Garden for Your Child
From Marie Iannotti,
To make gardening fun and accessible to kids, you need to make it personal. This is a gardening project from my local 4H organization that you can easily do with your own little clover buds. 'Garden in a Bucket' lets kids create a personal, private garden that they can carry with them, take care of, show off and enjoy. Even the shortest attention spans can create a masterpiece and then these junior gardeners can enjoy their Garden in a Bucket all summer.
Have the kids pick out a colorful bucket or pail. Then head over to a plant nursery and let them choose a few small bedding annuals, like marigolds or zinnias, or a dwarf cherry tomato plant.
Create drainage holes at the bottom of the bucket. An adult can poke a few holes with a nail and hammer or an electric drill. Three or four holes should be fine. If the bucket garden will be indoors and you’d prefer not to have drainage holes, fill the bottom of the bucket with 1-2 inches of Styrofoam peanuts to act as a reservoir, so the soil can still drain. This is a great use for those peanuts you can never get rid of.
Let each child write their name on the front of the bucket with a permanent market, so everyone will know whose garden it is. Then have them decorate their buckets before planting, with markers, stickers and glued on trinkets and glitter.
Have the kids fill their buckets about half way with the potting mix. Soilless mixes tend to be the lightest and will be easier for a child to carry in the bucket.
Then give them a small handful of time release fertilizer pellets to sprinkle and mix into the soil.
Help the kids carefully remove the plants from their containers and plant them inside their garden buckets. You can add more soil, if necessary.
Water the Garden in a Bucket and that’s it! You can put the garden in a place of honor or take a drive to Grandma’s to show it off.
Maintain the Garden in a Bucket by keeping it watered, probably daily. Have your child check to see if it needs water by letting them poke their finger gently into the soil. If it feels dry about an inch below the surface, it’s time to water. Of course, if the plants start to wilt, that’s a signal to water too.
To keep the Garden in a Bucket interesting, don’t forget to keep cutting the flowers to display in a vase or harvest and eat the tomatoes.
I found planter flower gardens work the best. I have a whole line of them down my driveway on top of white gravel and the flowers are doing great.
We had tomotoe garden planters on the deck one year with the kids. It was pretty nice to just walk out and grab a tomatoe on the deck rather than going to the back of the yard where we use to have a larger garden.
Here is a tip a worker at our garden center told me one time when I bought some patio tomatoe plants.
Keep the plants in the original pots even if you are putting them in containers on the deck etc. Place the pot with plant in your container and then put dirt around the whole pot. Otherwise if you remove the plant and re-plant it there will be an adjustment period that the plant will have to go through. Sometimes it can 'stunt' it's growth for awhile and the vegtable will take longer to get ripe.
I did try that and it seemed to work very well. If I recall I was told to also crack the pot down the sides to allow for the roots to come out later if it needed more room to grow.
Smart kids senior year of high school he worked at Z Gardens. He was always bringing home plants and doing just this........... cracking the pot sides etc......
You can bet I am going to "un" plant my tomatos this next year! Anything will help. You know, I've never really been happy with the results of my tomato growing efforts. Cherry tomatos produce an abundance but they also reseed all over. Other tomatos plants tend to get tall and flop all over producing fruit when the season is almost over. The early varieties don't produce much in the way of fruit. I have tried pruning off the "suckers" that develop in between the leaf nodes and that helped, but still... Anyone have any suggestions for tomatoes which will tolerate half day sun and a planter to boot? Lauri
It would be cute to use these colorful buckets with flowers around a child's play area outside. (just remember not to plant flowers that are poisenous).
I have more of a country theme going on in our yard where I use antique looking metal containers and old pails. I have one that is very much like this one in the picture but mine has a much older appeal to it rather than new like this.
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