More families will stretch food budgets with vegetable gardens

By Dean Fosdick for the Associated Press

Americans finding soaring food prices hard to stomach are fighting back by growing their own food.

Home vegetable gardens appear to be booming as a result of the twin movements to eat local and pinch pennies. Although the 2008 planting season is still largely in the planning stages, it appears vegetable seed sales will be up significantly from year-ago figures, said Barb Melera, president of D. Landreth Seed Co., in New Freedom, Pa.

"I just came back from the Southeastern Flower Show in Atlanta and we sold three to four times the amount of seed packets we did the previous year," Melera said.

"This is the first time I've ever heard people say, 'I can grow this more cheaply than I can buy it in the supermarket.' That's a 180-degree turn from the norm."

Roger Doiron, a gardener and fresh food advocate from Scarborough, Maine, said he turned $85 worth of seeds into more than six months of vegetables for his family of five.

"We're closing in on mid-February and we still have several quarts of tomato sauce, bags of mixed vegetables and ice-cube trays of pesto in the freezer; 20 heads of garlic, a 5-gallon crock of sauerkraut, more homegrown hot pepper sauce than one family could comfortably eat in a year and three sorts of squash, which we make into soups, stews and bread," he said.

As founding director of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit promoting home gardening and healthier food, Doiron pays close attention to pocketbook issues. Food, gasoline and oil prices are all up sharply compared with a year ago, making it more challenging to put a meal on the table.

"I see home gardens as a way of broadening and democratizing the local foods revolution, which until now has been more of an upper-class phenomenon," he said by e-mail. "Home gardening allows people to have their fresh, organic salad greens and pay for them, too."

At $3.80 a gallon, whole milk cost more through November of last year than the $2.99 average for unleaded gas, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and AAA.

Egg prices were 19.5% higher in June 2007 than they were the previous June, the U.S. Department of Labor said. Over that same period, the cost of fresh chicken was up 10%, apples 11.7%, dried beans 11.5% and white bread 9.6%.

Those conditions are ripe for an increase in gardening, said Rose Hayden-Smith, a garden educator and historian with the University of California-Davis.

"You always see an uptick in gardening activity in keeping with economic conditions -- consumer-driven waves that emulate recession and inflation-driven economies," Hayden-Smith said.

She compares the current period of market uncertainty with that of the early- to mid-20th Century when the concept of victory gardens became popular.

During World War II, gardens were pitched as an important part of the war effort -- by war's end, the victory gardens were turning out 40% of the nation's produce.

"Home gardens made the difference between people being well fed and going to bed hungry," Doiron said.

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