Gardens Gaining Ground Nationwide

Fed Up by Food Prices, Many Grow It Alone
Gardens Gaining Ground Nationwide
By Robin Shulman Washington Post August 3, 2008 - Fair Use snips...

It is a phenomenon that has always ebbed and flowed with the economy, said Bruce Butterfield, the market research director of the National Gardening Association, who has been tracking it for decades. The biggest recent peak in homegrown food came in 1975, during a national oil crisis, he said, when 49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables.

There were Liberty Gardens to help during World War I, and World War II inspired Victory Gardens, which produced an estimated 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the country in 1943. The Great Depression spawned Relief Gardens in the 1930s, and in 1974 President Gerald R. Ford encouraged Whip Inflation Now, or WIN, Gardens.

Last year, Butterfield said, about 22 percent of U.S. households -- including many in cities and suburbs -- grew vegetables, spending an average of $58 to do so, up from $48 per household in 2006. Butterfield anticipates that number will be significantly higher this year.

The reasons vary but include increasing interest in the quality and environmental impact of food. Recently, money has become a bigger factor.
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In Seattle, Marguerite Lynch, an interior designer, put up a sign on a 10-by-40-foot strip on her driveway saying, "We're sick of rising fuel and food prices so we're turning this weed patch into a vegetable garden. Want to help?"

A week later, she had five volunteers. She ordered organic vegetable compost, delivered in two giant dump trucks, and soon had a bed in which to plant beets, basil, Swiss chard, bush beans, peas, acorn squash, pumpkin and kale.

In Atlanta, Robin Marcus, who co-owns the Urban Gardener store, essentially created a home farm when she bought a city house with 3 1/2 -acre yard -- now full of tomatoes and okra and green beans. "We're doing eight quarts of spaghetti sauce from the yard right now, we've got so many tomatoes," she said.

Beneath the L train platform, Gentry and her daughters, Natasha, 10, and Queene, 6, can stop by the vegetable plot to pick some greens as they walk to the grocery store to buy salad dressing.

"I never thought they'd be able to run through a field of corn and sunflowers in New York City," Gentry said.