From Ghana to Duncan: How Baraka's Shipping Cardboard Feeds My Orchard

I grew up on a farm in small-town Saskatchewan. Gardens, animals, dirt under your fingernails — that was just life. Then I spent 40 years working around the world and in Ghana building Baraka and doing sustainability consulting, and somewhere in there I lost access to land. Apartments, guesthouses, compound houses. No garden. No space.

Last year I moved back to Duncan, BC. Two acres. And I have gone completely overboard.

I've put in 150 feet of raised beds — four feet wide, running throughout he property. Fruit and berry trees are going in: apples, pears, figs, kiwi, cherry, Saskatoon, haskap, gooseberry, blueberry. Raspberries from my dad's patch in Saskatchewan. An herb garden. It's a lot. My neighbours think I've lost my mind. They're probably right.

Today I spent the afternoon doing something that's been on my list since the trees went in — mulching them properly for the season. Cardboard down first, tight against the ground, overlapping at the edges. Then a shovel of fresh horse manure from the farmer down the road. Then old hay on top to hold it all in place.

The Cardboard Is Baraka's

Every shipment of shea butter, baobab oil, kombo butter and cocoa butter that travels from Ghana to our warehouse arrives in a container stuffed with heavy corrugated boxes. The boxes that aren't in good enough shape to reuse for customer orders — and there are always some — used to just go to recycling. Now they go to feed my soil and my neighbours too.

It's not a grand sustainability programme. It's just the obvious thing to do. The cardboard smothers weeds without chemicals, breaks down over the season and feeds the soil, and gives the earthworms something to work with underneath. The trees get a slow feed from the manure above and a weed-free start below. By next spring most of it will have disappeared into the soil.

Free Cardboard in the Cowichan Valley

I'm also putting a free listing on Facebook Marketplace — if anyone in the Cowichan Valley wants heavy corrugated cardboard for their own garden, come and get it. We go through a lot of boxes. Better in someone's garden than in a recycling bin.

This isn't really a Baraka story. It's just what happened on a weekend in March on a two-acre property in Duncan with a trailer of horse manure and a pile of boxes from Ghana. But it felt worth writing down. The cardboard that carried shea butter across an ocean is now feeding apple trees in British Columbia. There's something right about that.

It is a win, win, win story, the way environmental and social responsibility should be done, not as a zero sum trade-off.  I've actually spent decades training, consulting and teaching on this through the CSR ESG Training Institute.  It felt good to practice what I preached - and it will feel good to literally eat the fruits of my labour!

If you want to read more about where those boxes come from and the women who fill them, Baraka's 2025 Impact Report is a good place to start.

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