Associated Press
05-27-07
Grass-roots gardening movement' gains momentum
Homeowners take control of their food source with gardens.
Clarke Canfield
The Associated Press
Scarborough, Maine — During World War II, the government urged Americans to
plant "victory gardens," backyard plots of fruits and vegetables that were
supposed to ease reliance on the war-strained public food supply.
Today, Roger Doiron is repeating that call, this time to ease the strain of
industrial agriculture on the environment and help people take control of what
they eat.
"In a way, I'd say I'm trying to reinvent the suburbs and put food back on the
suburban landscape," says Doiron, a freelance writer and consultant who grows
vegetables, blueberries, strawberries, apples, cranberries and herbs on his thirdof-an-acre lot.
Around the country, people from Maine to California are spreading the word
about the benefits of gardens in what some are calling a "grass-roots gardening
movement."
Doiron's Web site, Kitchen Gardeners International, extols the virtues of taking
control of your food while reducing the distance it travels from the farm to the
fork, which some estimates put at an average of 1,500 miles.
Once common to backyards, kitchen gardens have become a why-bother sort of
thing for most Americans.
But now some say the pendulum may be swinging back. Between E. coli scares,
global warming, the "buy local" movement, aging baby boomers with more time
to spare and a desire to enjoy the freshest of fresh, a new wave of grow-yourown has begun.
Heather Flores started a "Food Not Lawns" campaign in Oregon several years
ago, and last year authored a book by the same name. There now are about 10
"Food Not Lawns" chapters in the U.S. and Canada.
Flores, who lives in Coburg, Ore., hears from people all over who have been
inspired to plant their own gardens, with reasons ranging from environmental
concerns to simply wanting to get their hands dirty.
"There's something about self-healing and self-worth that people feel with getting
out in the home garden," she says.
In Pasadena, Calif., Jules Dervaes five years ago turned his tiny house lot into an
urban farm nestled between two expressways. He now harvests 3 tons of
produce a year, gives tours and has a Web site to encourage others to follow his
lead.
Dervaes says people tell him his story has inspired them to use their backyards
for something other than manicured lawns.
"They'd forgotten what it was for," he says. "What's old is new again."
It's difficult to measure the interest in backyard gardening. Experts say it is
strong, though the National Gardening Association says the number of homes
with gardens in the U.S. has ranged around a quarter during the past decade.
Rich Pirog of the Leopold Center, a center for sustainable agriculture at
Iowa State University, says food scares — think E. coli or mad cow disease —
and natural disasters are arousing interest in where food comes from.
"It's reached into the average consumer's consciousness," he says.
The retirement of the baby boomer generation also is fueling growth in
gardening, says George Ball, president and CEO of W. Atlee Burpee & Co., the
largest seed company in North America. Burpee's sales have been growing at up
to 10 percent a year.
"When we face retirement or a slowdown in our lives, one of the time-based
activities that is rewarding is gardening," he says.
Doiron became a convert to home-grown foods while living in Belgium during the
1990s. There he became acquainted with so-called slow food (the antithesis of
fast food culture), as well as the French protest against "La Malbouffe," or bad
food.
When he and his family moved in 2001 to the same Maine neighborhood where
he'd grown up, Doiron noticed how few backyard gardens there were. He made it
his mission to get more people to plant gardens and prepare food themselves.
Besides growing a smorgasbord of foods in his yard, Doiron holds neighborhood
garden parties and has created an International Kitchen Gardener Day, to be
celebrated the fourth Sunday of each August.
His Web site draws about 70,000 unique visitors a month, and his e-mail
newsletter goes to 3,200 people in 80 countries.
Though Americans are embracing the organic and local food movements, many
still have questions, Doiron says. Should you buy conventional broccoli from a
nearby farm, or the organic variety that was grown 1,000 miles away and
required hundreds of gallons of fuel to get to your table?
"But there's no quandary whatsoever with food from your own backyard," he
says.
If that's not enough to persuade people to plant a garden, then the cost savings
might be. Last year, Doiron got one to two months' worth of lettuce from a $3
packet of seeds.
"We went five months without buying a vegetable, and we ate like royalty," he
says.
And a new study out of St. Louis University suggests that young children in rural
areas eat more fruits and vegetables when the produce is homegrown, and that
garden-fed children prefer the taste of fruits and vegetables to other foods.
During World War II, some 20 million people answered the call to plant their own
gardens in the name of patriotism. This time, Doiron says, the issue is about
feeding the world, which is expected to grow from 6.5 billion to 9 billion people by
2045.
"It's all meant to be working toward the goal of sustainability, which we have to
be working toward if we're going to feed 9 billion people nutritiously in the next 40
years or so," he said.