Gardens are Growing....in Number

(Bevis) It’s hot, it’s hazy, it’s humid, the sun could not be higher in the sky and there are still folks out here in the Community Gardens in Concord working in their gardens.

(Levallee) Ron Levallee.

(Bevis)And you’re from?

(Levallee) From Henniker New Hampshire. We’ve got a 50 by 50 plot that I just harvested a bunch of garlic, and we do tomatoes, kale, beans, and the tough part is keeping up with the weeds.

(Douglas) Shanti Douglas.

(Bevis) And you’re from?

(Douglas) Concord.

(Bevis) And what are you growing.

(Douglas) I’m growing corn, beans, peas, squash, kohlrabi cabbage, black beans, onions, what else is down there, spinach and carrots.

So why would these folks join mad dogs and Englishmen in the midday sun?

They’ve got lots of reasons.

“ (Levallee) It is important for us to work the soil and if we have extra we give it to the food bank
“ (Douglas) being able to grow things and bring the kids out and have them help with that is really important.
‘(Levallee) we know what we put into the garlic, we know what we put into all these vegetables. There are no chemicals.
“ (Douglas) hopefully to also help feed my family this year.

They’ve also got lots of company.

In a report published earlier this year, The National Garden Association estimated that nearly a third of all US household had some sort of food garden last year.

They expected that number to grow by about 19% this year….to about 46 million households.

The Garden Association doesn’t have any hard data yet for how many people followed through on their plans.

But a lot of anecdotal evidence seems to point to growth.

“I probably did three times as many vegetable gardening classes as I did last year.”

That’s Margaret Hagen with the University of New Hampshire’s Cooperative Extention Service.

She runs the Family, Home & Garden Education Center.

She says she usually does 2 or 3 speaking engagements a month during the spring.

This spring she did more than 20.

She also keeps track of the number of community gardens popping up in the state.

There are nearly 40.

She says the number has grown by about 25% since last year, despite the administrative hassles of setting them up.

“Running a community garden is a lot of work and the fact that we have so many new community gardens in New Hampshire this year is really telling about how much people want to grow their own food.”

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that my family has a plot at the Concord Community Garden.

We got it because the garden expanded by dozens of new plots this year.

But there is still a waiting list.

Another indicator of the growth in gardening is sales at garden centers.

Paul Osborne is the manager of the Agway Store in Concord.

“ Seed sales probably up by at least 50%. A lot of people trying it for the first time. You know where economic times are a little tough this year, and a lot of people are trying it.”

Osbourne says he has seven or eight different vendors set up seed racks in his store.

All of them, he says, have sold out.

“I was worried last year it was a one year type of thing, and it seems to be back even stronger this year. I think provided people have reasonable success, I think they’ll do it again.”

Having reasonable success this rainy summer may be tougher than usual.

And people like Osbourne at Agway and Hagen at the Cooperative Extension worry that the less committed gardener may give up.

But even the bad weather has been good news for the gardening business.

More people have come back this year to buy replacements for those soggy, less than successful crops.

For NHPR News, I’m Mark Bevis.