Click here for the official guidelines from the Boy Scouts of America for the Family Life Merit Badge.
Family life includes meals. Getting food for the family is an important part of being an adult member of a family unit, particularly if there are children in the family. The health and vitality of any family is greatly dependent upon the healthfulness of its diet. Food sourcing and food quality are important issues for any family.
This badge requires that you prepare a list of your regular home duties or chores, do them for 90 days, and keep a record of the work you have done. This could include any work you do to build and support a self-watering container garden that produces healthy non-GMO, organically grown fruits and vegetables for your family. This badge also requires you to decide on and carry out a project at home to benefit your family, as well as plan and carry out a project that involves the participation of your family. Building a self-watering container garden could fulfill either of these criteria.
You could also, as a separate project, build a composter for your garden. Either building your garden or your composter could be something you do with your family while the other activity would satisfy the badge requirement to do a project on your own. In planning the project you do with your family, be sure to specify in discussing with your Badge Counselor the goal of the project when you started (what you want you and your family to achieve – i.e., build out 5 self-watering bucket containers or assembly a composter kit), as well as how the individual members of your family participated and the results of your efforts (e.g. “Mom drilled the center holes, Dad drilled the holes for the PVC, and I drilled the little holes for the drainage in the bottoms of the upper buckets assembly-line style; we each had our own drill fitted with the proper cutting/drilling implement for our respective steps in the process and the buckets passed from Mom to Dad to me until they were all cut and drilled. It took about 15 minutes to get them all cut and drilled doing it this way.”)
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