Food for Thought – Episode 5: Comparison of Total D.I.Y. vs. GroBucket

In this episode of Food for Thought, Anne Zachry, creator of the Learn & Grow Educational Series and her colleague and Learn & Grow volunteer, Isabel Arreola, compare a total DIY version of a self-watering container to a self-watering container made with a GroBucket…

Food for Thought – Episode 3: Teaching How Systems Work Through Gardening

In our 3rd episode of Food for Thought, our director and creator of the Learn & Grow Educational Series discusses how to use gardening to teach kids about systems, how they work, and how they interact with each other to create larger systems. References:…

Let Us Make You a Garden

If you are located in Ventura, Santa Barbara, or West Los Angeles County, California, and would like a custom-built self-watering container garden, but don’t have the time to put it together yourself, we are making ourselves available to collect the recycled pieces, pre-cut the…

Food for Thought – Episode 1: Food Security During Times of Crisis

This is Episode 1 of our Vlog, Food for Thought. This episode is titled, “Food Security During Times of Crisis.” This video discusses the use of an old urban gardening technique, self-watering containers made from 5-gallon buckets, as a means of ensuring food security…

From Our Garden: Okra

Okra, known as Lady Fingers in some parts of the world, forms an elongated fruit from each flower. The flowers only last for a day or two and the fruits are ready to pick just a few days after that. Okra is most commonly…

New Self-Watering Container Garden Built in India

About a year ago, I encountered my friend, Avanish, on Facebook through mutual online friends in the organic gardening realm of the web. We both had a common interest in sustainable living and our online conversations started around Learn & Grow. At about that…

From Bucket to Table: The Life Story of a Squash

At first, there’s the female flower with a little green bulb behind it. Pollen from the male flowers, which are on straight stems, fertilize the female flower, causing the little green bulb to develop into a squash fruit. Once the flower has been fertilized,…

Relocating a Self-Watering Bucket Container Garden

Our Learn & Grow Educational Series test garden was started in June 2013 as an experiment motivated by my personal curiosity about food, people’s relationships with it, their understandings about where food comes from, food education in our schools, the nutritional values of food…