by Tom Atwell, published August 20, 2006 in the Maine Sunday Telegram

What could be better than having a garden just steps from the kitchen table, where a kid could go out and grab a tomato or carrots or a handful of strawberries for snacking?

In the United States, people - if they grow food at all - have vegetable gardens, usually in the backyard and quite a distance from the house. But in Europe, kitchen gardens - with vegetables, herbs and fruit - are literally right outside the kitchen door.

Roger Doiron of Scarborough founded Kitchen Gardens International in 2003 and has 2,500 people from 50 countries signed up for its electronic newsletter.

Next Sunday - Aug. 27 - the group is moving from the virtual world to the physical one, holding garden events at what is being called Kitchen Garden Day.

Doiron is holding one in his neighborhood, at 3 Powderhorn Drive, off Pleasant Hill Road. Beginning at 2 p.m., visitors will tour his kitchen garden, walk through the neighborhood looking at a few other vegetable gardens, and then have a tomato tasting. Those who have homegrown tomatoes are invited to bring some in to be tried and compared with tomatoes others bring in. The event is expected to finish by 4 p.m.

The idea is to have similar events on the fourth Sunday of August in future years.

While Doiron formed Kitchen Gardens International as a volunteer, he works professionally at the Eat Local Foods Coalition of Maine, a group that urges people to buy food from local farms. He said kitchen gardens are sort of an extension of that, in that nothing could be more local than food grown right outside the kitchen door.

Doiron likes kitchen gardens for a variety of reasons: health, quality cuisine, financial benefits and environmental concerns.

"It's a little bit strategic," he said. "It is not always the easiest thing to get people, no matter what age they are, to eat their vegetables. But if you frame the whole idea of eating vegetables in terms of cuisine, by deciding what are those vegetables going to be combined with to be put on the family table, that becomes a powerful notion."

Doiron said he spent 10 years living in Europe, mostly in Belgium but also in France, working for Friends of the Earth, and found that people were more conscious of what they were eating and how it affected the world around them.

He said Kitchen Garden Day and Kitchen Gardens International are an attempt to get more people to give gardening a try.

"If people can see that it is not rocket science - or even really soil science - they can learn as they go," he said. "Dig up a patch of lawn, get the kids involved."

I have always said I have a garden because I get a kick out of creating food and watching it appear in my garden, and because I like the taste of freshly picked produce, but that I don't expect to save money.

Doiron said - and he is probably right - that I am doing my price comparison with imported, mass-produced vegetables, and that if you compare the right sorts of vegetables, you can save money.

"We do some things where I am sure I am getting a very good deal," he said. "We plant successive planting of different lettuce mixes, including Johnny's All-Star Mix, which is a cut and come again from Johnny's Selected Seeds, and out of a single packet of seeds we have had multiple salads. Compare that to what it would cost at a natural food place where you get salad greens for $6 a pound. I am definitely beating that."

Flavor is another reason for a kitchen garden.

The best-tasting tomatoes do not survive shipping well, he said, and commercial farms grow tomatoes that look good and ship well. If you pick your tomato varieties for taste, let them ripen on the vine and eat them fresh, there's no food like it.

As a parent of children ages 6 and 8, Doiron uses his gardens as a teaching tool. He had the children plant the smaller of his two gardens. He grows an organic garden, and the children are free to take and eat anything that is growing in it.

"Even though they have permission, it seems like they think they are getting away with something when they do that," Doiron said. And they get healthy snacks in the bargain.

I do the same thing with my grandchildren, who often come over Sundays. I purposely leave at least part of the strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, peas or beans unpicked, and they love snacking in our garden. And it certainly is better for them than potato chips or other typical snack foods.

Doiron said his kitchen-garden effort is about more than growing food.

"I want to educate people about how to cook again," he said. "We are a couple of generations away from people who know what growing food is all about and about what home cooking is all about. They think home cooking is opening a jar of tomato sauce, because that is what people think they can afford in terms of time. But the average American finds time to watch four hours of television a day."

Kitchen gardens and local foods also have an environmental impact.

Food on average travels 1,500 miles from ground to table, and it requires 400 gallons of oil per year - in oil to produce chemical fertilizer and to transport food - to feed the average American each year. Locally produced food uses, on average, 1/17th as much petroleum.

In 1870, 35 percent of food was grown for home consumption. That figure is now 1 percent.

"Those types of statistics will bring to kitchen gardening some populations that we are trying to reach - those who are tuned in globally, are politically aware and want to know what they can do to play a positive role as a mother or father."

Doiron said that no kitchen garden can be too small. In cities, a lot of the kitchen gardens are done in containers on balconies. For a beginning gardener, he said, a 10-by-10-foot garden or something equivalent would be as large as he would advise going. You can get a lot of food from 100 square feet. And only if you have success with that, should you go larger.

"Nothing is too small," he said. The trick is to get started somewhere."