A nonprofit publication of the Kentucky Center for Public Service Journalism

Kentucky by Heart: A most underrated tool of the small farmer or gardener — the trusty bucket


By Steve Flairty
NKyTribune Columnist

I should have learned while growing up in Claryville that the most important tool for the gardener or small farmer could well be the common, relatively inexpensive bucket. It was right there in front of me.

Steve and The Bucket (Photo provided)

However, that observation hadn’t dawned on me until recently while doing some work in my yard and the fledgling spring flower beds. The plastic five-gallon bucket with a hard-wire handle seemed to follow me everywhere I work on my one-acre lot, I mused. On this day, I was weeding and carried several tools and my gloves in the bucket while walking to the initial work site. Using those items, I piled handfuls of weeds, small sticks, and last season’s dead flowers into The Bucket I bought a couple of years ago at Meijer, in Lexington.

It’s a mainstay of my outdoor gardening work, for sure — The Bucket.

Other tools around my humble abode cost much more and are used much less: the electric chainsaw, the power washer, and even my leaf and grass blower—important, but not used nearly every day like The Bucket, value-priced at about four or five dollars and very durable.

Thinking back to 1960s Claryville, when my agrarian life came not by personal choice, I recall eating lunchtime sandwiches with my brother, Mike, and Mom while sitting on an upturned bucket (Dad was at work). This after containing the picked green beans in The Bucket, along with lightweight wooden baskets. We sat under the maple tree in our front yard “breaking” those beans, readying them for canning.

Steve Flairty is a teacher, public speaker and an author of seven books: a biography of Kentucky Afield host Tim Farmer and six in the Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes series, including a kids’ version. Steve’s “Kentucky’s Everyday Heroes #5,” was released in 2019. Steve is a senior correspondent for Kentucky Monthly, a weekly KyForward and NKyTribune columnist and a former member of the Kentucky Humanities Council Speakers Bureau. Contact him at sflairty2001@yahoo.com or visit his Facebook page, “Kentucky in Common: Word Sketches in Tribute.” (Steve’s photo by Connie McDonald)

At about age 12, I sometimes carried (actually “dragged”) The Bucket filled with 10-10-10 fertilizer or ammonium nitrate some 50 yards from a shed to the tobacco patch. Those little white granules were adult-sized heavy while filling up only as much as half of the five-gallon capacity. Dad always had plenty of those containers around, sometimes stacked vertically inside of each other, making a small tower and individual ones often were hard to pull apart for farming duty. And when individual buckets with fertilizer sat for a long while, I remember how sticky, almost gummy they became.

Our family watered trees and shrubs with The Bucket, and we carried trowels, snippers, and maybe even a hoe hanging out of a bucket if you managed it just right. We also used it for carrying spuds we dug out of our potato patch, and the sound of dumping them out of The Bucket onto our tractor-pulled trailer sounded like Thunder Road. The Bucket also served as a reservoir for tobacco plants we used to “reset” the missing spots in the long rows of our burley patch.

Playful Stevie also enjoyed target practicing with The Bucket by throwing dirt clods or walnuts from a distance, aiming to score “baskets” when the projectiles landed inside. I got pretty good at it, but regretfully those skills didn’t translate into productive basketball skills. With that, I decided to teach and to write for my life’s work.

Today, The Bucket is like an important link, a bridge to my heritage; for that reason, I want to spontaneously hug the thing sometimes. Of course, I don’t want the neighbors to talk. They already see me as a genuine tree hugger, but a “bucket hugger” would definitely increase the six-feet radius of their social distancing.

And my friends have personal connections to The Bucket, also.

Janice Winiger, of Winchester, designates buckets with lids to store leftover potting soil. She also uses her buckets to store birdseed, dry pet food, and metal ones with rusted bottoms (for drainage) and soil to grow herbs.

Former Lexington resident Susan Gall, now living in Florida, told me that “Floridians grow pineapples in buckets!” Betsy Fleischer, of Harrodsburg, uses buckets with holes in the bottom “for watering young plantings like bushes.”

Pineapples growing in a bucket. (Photo provided)

One person told me about putting rusty chains in their bucket to soak in some type of agent to remove the rust, and another mentioned The Bucket is a good place to store garden hoses.

London resident and Executive Director at the Kentucky Artisan Center, in Berea, Todd Finley, has lots to say about the function of The Bucket in his family. He cited some of the uses already mentioned, along with others. “It carries water and also is helpful in bailing out water when needed. It’s a good to use to hand wash your car. It holds pool chemicals for easy broadcasting and yes, it will even hold the discarded parts of fish when cleaning and processing them after a bountiful fishing trip. The cats love the scraps from the bucket. Bucket gets a little bleach and some water and is good as new. We like our bucket!”

Like Todd Finley, Jason Eades, of Winchester, adores his bucket, too, and puts his fishing trip scraps in his garden for use as fertilizer. Florence resident Julia Pile sets her water sprinkler atop a bucket.

And we could go on with this “bucket list,” but for now, I’ll “kick the bucket” on this column and wish you the very best as you carry your bucket forward.


Related Posts

Leave a Comment