To support partner communities of the Victory Gardens initiative, the SURGe project provided the Buky community with supplies for canning and long-term storage of grown vegetables.

Buky is one of the many communities in Ukraine that joined the Victory Gardens initiative to ensure food self-sufficiency during the war. As a result, the community, together with volunteers, internally displaced people (IDP), and local entrepreneurs, planted additional vegetable fields in the spring, and now they are thinking about distribution and preservation of the harvest.

The community has decided to divide the most significant portion of the harvest between the frontline, low-income families, and IDPs, as there are almost seven thousand IDPs in the community now. For the long-term storage and use of harvested food products, the community has received 16 autoclaves, cans, and lids for preservation from SURGe.

“We are already actively using these autoclaves to produce meat and meat-beef stew. On the first day , we produced more than 600 cans of meat, which will be used both for our soldiers and the community’s needs. In addition, we are planning to make condensed milk and vegetable preserves,” shares the head of the community, Serhii Zaliznyak.

The community is optimistic – they believe in victory, and after the end of the war, they plan to improve their production and establish a local cooperative for processing agricultural products.