Students create self-watering buckets for growing plants

You don’t need a yard to grow vegetables. A simple self-watering bucket can turn an apartment balcony or other small space into a garden.

Hands On Harvests is collaborating with Braddock Elementary School in Annandale to provide dozens of containers for families who don’t have access to land.

Joyce Matthews, a teacher at Braddock and a member of the Hands On Harvests board, is leading the project.

Rebecca Tax of Lazy Mike’s Deli in Falls Church donated 168 five-gallon pickle buckets that the staff had cleaned. That is enough for 84 assembled self-watering “grow buckets.”

Jim Howland, a gardener who cultivates vegetables for Hands On Harvests’ Grow a Row program and who’s also a technology education teacher at Falls Church High School, recruited students to help.

Each container consists of two 5-gallon buckets stacked together with holes on the sides. A piece of PVC pipe that is 5 inches long and 1 inch wide connects the two buckets. A 2-inch PVC pipe with a filler such as cotton inside fits in a second hole in the middle of the bucket.

Related story: Students are working on robotic gardening

The top bucket is filled with soil for growing a plant. The bottom bucket holds water. The smaller pipe provides water directly to the root of the plant. The Falls Church students cut the pipes and other pieces and assembled the buckets.

Grow a Row volunteers cultivated tomato and pepper plants from seeds. Hands On Harvests then delivered 84 plants to Braddock Elementary School. The Braddock students will plant them in the buckets on May 23.

Fifty of the buckets will be given to Food Justice DMV, an organization that addresses food insecurity among immigrants. The remaining 34 buckets will go to Braddock ES families.