Use of bucket in Home Kitchen Garden:

Our staff, Mina and Anjana worked with the women farmers groups. Their main responsibility was to train the housewives on making vegetable gardens adjacent to their house. They trained the women groups on – mixed farming, vegetable rotation system, different types of compost making, preparation of bio-pest controllers, etc. The main aim of this training was to ensure the basic nutrition of poor families and the concept was zero waste. Converting the peels of the vegetable and other house hold waste into manures and making vegetables with these manures, so that the family members could get organic, home made fresh vegetable with minimum efforts.

In the month of April, 09, they went for a training programme in Vaduria village of Swarupnagar Block. There was a training on kitchen garden making with the housewives from BPL (below poverty line) families. One of the trainees, Shyamali Mondal asked Mina that she was very much interested in making such kitchen garden but she had no land adjacent to her home.

Hearing this, Mina advised her to use their tiles roof as trellis for pumpkin and bottle gourd. She(Mina) told her to collect two plastic buckets and filled it with sand clay and vermicompost in 1:3 ratio and also told her to make a small orifice at the bottom so that the excess water could passed through it. After the filling of the buckets she was asked to put one sapling of pumpkin in a pot and one sapling of bottle gourd to another. Shyamali also put some bamboo sticks adjacent to the buckets so that the saplings could climb these and could reach to the tiles roof easily.

From, July, 09, Shyamoli got a number of pumpkins and bottle gourds on her tiled roof. So far she had got 25 bottle gourds and 11 pumpkins. She and her family members were very happy with it. Her detailed income –expenditure reports were given below.
EXPENDITURE:
Unused Bucket                          8.00
Vermicompost                          10.00
Saplings                                      1.00
…………………………………………………………….
T O T A L                                 19.00
INCOME:
ITEM                   WT(Kg)         UNIT RATE        PRICE
Bottle gourd           100                    6.00                600.00
Bottle gourd leaf       20                    4.00                  80.00
Pumpkin                   33                  10.00                330.00
Pumpkin leaf             12                    4.00                  48.00
…………………………………………………………………....................
T O T A L                                                            1058.00
NET PROFIT: Rs. 1039.00 (Rupees one thousand thirty nine only)