William Merelle of Rouge in West Stockbridge, www.rougerestaurant.com created the White House in gingerbread to win the Best Gingerbread House by a professional chef at Wheatleigh's annual Gingerbread House Silent Auction and Competition to benefit Share the Bounty on Sunday December 7, 2008.
Here's another view of the fabulous Gingerbread White House created by William Merelle of Rouge Restaurant for Wheatleigh's Benefit for Share the Bounty.
in an open letter to the next president of the US, outlining a new food and farming agenda, published in the October 12, 2008 New York Times Magazine:"First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
| T | |
| Boston GLOBE EDITORIAL Back on the farmFARM AID is coming to Massachusetts in September. The roving concert began in 1985 to help farmers who faced foreclosure. But when Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Dave Matthews take to the stage at the The typical Massachusetts farm sells $24,900 of products directly to consumers each year - the highest average in the nation. The state is well ahead of the curve on farmers markets - where people buy direct from the farmer in town squares and parking lots - and memberships in community-supported agriculture. CSA arrangements take the farmers market concept to the extreme. At a market, the farmer still takes all the risk of bringing produce to town in the hopes of people buying it. In a CSA, people support the actual operation, through thick and thin, by purchasing shares before the season. Members get a weekly drop-off of available produce. The year of the first Farm Aid concert, the first CSA in the United States was started in South Egremont by the late Robyn Van En. Today, there are more than 1,200 nationwide. Massachusetts has at least 60 CSAs, and it and Rhode Island have the densest concentration of community-supported farms in the nation, according to the Robyn Van En Center at Wilson College in Pennsylvania. In recent years, altruism toward family farmers has combined with a new concern over the quality, nutrition, and carbon footprint of processed foods and corporate-farmed produce. A growing number of shoppers prefer to purchase greens, tomatoes and blueberries in the open air from the people who grew them. This change in consumer sentiment could prove lucrative for farmers. "We're well positioned to be the leading edge of an agricultural renaissance," Ian Bowles, state secretary for energy and environmental affairs, predicted in a telephone interview. The state encourages the growth of farmers markets, he said. Massachusetts has gone from about 90 farmers markets five years ago to 164. "We have to get people off the streets and back on the land," Willie Nelson said 16 years ago, "and we have to get back to the situation where a young couple can take 100 acres and make a living." Fortunately, the economics of farming may be shifting, as even people who live in cities are getting back to the land. |
There are 10 characters in all, and Jaffe manages to put a different and convincing spin on each of them, skillfully swapping voices and body language from part to part.
This is a show that manages to make some important points, but without hitting you over the head with its message.”
“Edible landscape” seems to be going head to head with “staycation” as the most popular catch phrase of Summer 2008. Lawns may not be disappearing before our very eyes, but citizens are definitely swapping out blades of grass for bushels of beans in increasing numbers.
Take me for instance, a bona fide city dweller: As a follow up to my column in March on the reclamation of urban and suburban land for agricultural use, I’ve spent the last several weeks putting theory into practice, literally getting my hands dirty (and whatever other cliché I can unearth) in the interest of urban agriculture.
My backyard, before and after. (Allison Arieff)Two months ago, I learned about My Farm, run by mortgage-broker-turned-farmer Trevor Paque. My Farm is essentially an urban take on community-sponsored agriculture (CSAs). With CSAs, individuals essentially invest in rural farms to help support their operations and are given a weekly box of fresh produce in return. With My Farm (and similar operations found in cities including New York and Portland, Ore.), you can grow food in your own backyard with the assistance of urban farmers like Paque. In one day, he created our 120-square-foot backyard farm — landscaping with found materials from the yard, installing a drip-irrigation system and planting heirloom seeds. Now he comes once a week to harvest a box of organic and ridiculously local produce for us — plus an additional box, which he sells to another family in our neighborhood.
This costs us about $100 a month, and has allowed us to replace our water-dependent grass patch with an edible landscape. After just three months in business, Paque has a waiting list of over 200 people and is scrambling to keep up with demand.
Urban agriculture has been around since at least the 18th century, but it’s an idea whose time has truly come — now — in the United States. The reasons range from the fact that our hands are always found glued to computer keys and not even occasionally in the dirt, to the scary existence of industrially grown tomatoes that may (or may not) cause salmonella, to the fact that a drive to the market can now cost more than the food you purchase there.
Though some may see this as a “lazy locavore” trend — wherein couch potato clients, glass of biodynamic Syrah in hand, observe the hard labor of city farmers while lounging with their laptops — the urban agriculture movement seems to me to be slowly transcending its elitist associations. It is truly growing into something that is wholly about collaboration, community and connection to food, to neighbors, to land.
That’s certainly been my experience both in my yard, as neighbors and friends come by to help harvest (and to eat), and in my city. Earlier this month, my family spent a Saturday at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, helping to plant a 10,000-square-foot Victory Garden sponsored by Slow Food Nation, a nonprofit organization that will be celebrating American food through art, music, lectures, tastings, school programs and the like over Labor Day Weekend. More than 250 volunteers and nearly a dozen Bay Area gardening organizations dedicated their time to plant the first edible garden in front of San Francisco’s City Hall since 1943. Designed by John Bela of the arts collective REBAR and curated by the artist/gardener/activist Amy Francheschini of Victory Gardens 2008+, this public installation aims to demonstrate the potential of a truly local agriculture practice while producing high-quality food for those in need.
Slow Food Nation’s victory garden in front of San Francisco City Hall. (Courtesy of Scott Chernis/Scott Chernis Photography)This day was social networking of the best sort. Participants got some dirt under their fingernails, ran into old friends, ate an organic lunch and left weary but happy. It was as much about community creation as food cultivation. I hope to see this sort of urban (and suburban) intervention replicated across the country. (It will be a shame if the city of San Francisco can’t find a way to either keep the garden here or find a suitable space to relocate it.)
This isn’t just a California thing, nor does it require vast amounts of open space. At PS1 in Long Island City, N.Y., the architecture firm WORK AC eschewed that art institution’s traditionalUrban Beach concept for an Urban Farm.
Planters at PS1, part of WORK AC’s Urban Farm”/>Planters are part of WORK AC’s Urban Farm project. (Elizabeth Felicella)“This came out a desire to combine urbanism with ecology,” explains Work Architecture Company principal Dan Wood, who with his partner, Amale Andraos, and their architecture students at Princeton have concluded that the urban farm is really the holy grail of making things sustainable. WORK AC’s take is particularly urban, featuring things like a mobile phone charging station, speakers that emit farm-animal sounds and “Gaia” soil made from recycled Styrofoam and pectin gel. Food harvested from the project is used at PS1’s café, thus reducing food miles to a whopping 300 feet.
When I spoke with Wood and Andraos recently, it was evident that this project is the result of an intricate network of people and places. They spoke excitedly of the great advice they’d received, for example, from Michael Grady Robertson of the 50-acre Queens County Farm Museum (which I bet you didn’t know existed) in New York and from their solar panel installer, who’d honed his craft in Alaska. Andraos stressed that they really wanted this typically rural thing to offer to city dwellers all the things that attract them about city living: social interaction, play, excitement, fun.
If all of this has helped plant a seed of inspiration, why not enter Readymade’s Second Annual Garden Challenge. The DIY bible Readymade, which inspires its readership toward the execution (or at least vicarious realization) of creative ideas on small budgets, invites readers to submit ideas for transforming their own outdoor spaces in innovative ways. (E-mail ideas to shana@readymademag.com by Aug. 1.) I’ve no doubt they’ll be hearing from hordes of less-than-lazy locavores.
http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/grow-your-own/?ex=1217995200&en=534a5e36de794743&ei=5070&emc=eta1Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?
That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.
Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.
Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.
“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”
Locally grown food, even fully cooked meals, can be delivered to your door. A share in a cow raised in a nearby field can be brought to you, ready for the freezer — a phenomenon dubbed cow pooling. There is pork pooling as well. At Sugar Mountain Farm in Vermont, the demand for a half or whole rare-breed pig is so great that people will not be seeing pork until the late fall.
Although a completely local diet is out of reach for even the most dedicated, the shift toward it is being driven by the increasingly popular view that fast food is the enemy and that local food tastes better. Depending on the season, local produce can cost an additional $1 a pound or more. But long-distance food, with its attendant petroleum consumption and cheap wages, is harming the planet and does nothing to help build communities, locavores believe.
As a result of interest in local food and rising grocery bills, backyard gardens have been enjoying a renaissance across the country, but what might be called the remote-control backyard garden — no planting, no weeding, no dirt under the fingernails — is a twist. “They want to have a garden, they don’t want to garden,” said the cookbook author Deborah Madison, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.
Her neighbor Chase Ault, a business consultant, recently had a vegetable garden installed with a customized set of plants and a regular service agreement. “I am working 24-7 these days, but I wanted to have something growing in front of me,” Ms. Ault said.
Like organic food, which corporate manufacturers embraced in the 1990s, before it, local food is quickly moving into the mainstream. Last year, the New Oxford American Dictionary picked locavore as its word of the year. A National Restaurant Association survey this year of more than 1,200 chefs, many of whom work for chain restaurants or large food companies, found locally grown produce to be the second-hottest American food trend, just behind bite-size desserts.
For a growing number of diners, a food’s provenance is more important than its brand name, said Michelle Barry, who studies American eating patterns for the Hartman Group, a research firm in Bellevue, Wash. As a result, grocery stores are looking to repackage products like milk and cheese to play up any local angle.
That will be a boon to people who find that shortcuts are necessary if they wish to eat locally. “If you live on East 80th 14 floors up and all you have is a potted plant, it’s tough,” said Lynne Rossetto Kasper, the host of the radio show “The Splendid Table,” who recruited 15 listeners for a study on the subject. Researchers will record their struggles to make 80 percent of their meals from organic or local sources. Spices are the only exemption.
Lazy locavores would never go to such extremes. Rather, they might simply sign up with the FruitGuys. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Philadelphia, will deliver boxes of local, sustainably raised or organic fruit right to the cubicle.
In the mood for a meal that reeks of community but does not necessitate a communal activity? Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley, Calif., which describes itself as a community supported kitchen, offers its customers the opportunity to make friends while making food from local, sustainable farms, but the worker-owned company also offers online shopping for people who do not have the time to pick up orders or participate in educational activities.
Customers 20 miles away in the affluent community of Mill Valley, for example, can pay $15 to have jars filled with Andalusian stew, made with pasture-raised pork, delivered to their door. The jars, of course, are returnable.
“It’s a very savvy crowd that understands how all the pieces of sustainable farming and nutrition fit together,” said Larry Wisch, one of five worker-owners at Three Stone Hearth. “But they don’t want the headaches of getting here.”
Or you could just have your private chef handle all your local food needs. At their Hamptons summer house, John and Lorna Brett Howard want to eat almost exclusively local, which means that in place of one trip to the grocery store, their chef, Michael Welch, makes several trips to farm stands and the fishmonger.
“What I’m seeing with my clients is not the trendiness or the politics,” Mr. Welch said. “They are looking only at taste.”
Mrs. Howard said she ate local vegetables growing up in northern Michigan and Chicago. But her husband, a private equity fund manager, ate a lot of expensive imported food with little thought about where it came from. But all that has changed.
“It’s like the first time you start drinking good red wine and you realize what you were drinking was so bad you can’t go back to it,” Mrs. Howard said. “It’s that same way with vegetables.”
The author Barbara Kingsolver, whose book “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” was a best seller last year, did not have the lazy locavore in mind when she wrote about the implications of making her family spend a year eating local. But she celebrates the trend.
“As a person of rural origin who has lived much of my life in rural places,” she said, “I can’t tell you how joyful it makes me to hear that it’s trendy for people in Manhattan to own a part of a cow.”
AT the end of the summer, the gastronomic organization called Slow Food USA will host a little party for more than 50,000 people in San Francisco.
To get things ready, the mayor let the group dig up the lawn in front of City Hall and plant a quarter-acre garden. It will be the centerpiece of the festival, ambitiously named Slow Food Nation.
Events will pop up all around the city over Labor Day weekend. Fifteen architects have volunteered to build elaborate pavilions dedicated to things like pickles, coffee and salami. Lecture halls have been booked, politicians invited and dinner parties planned. Nearly $2 million has been raised.
And for the first time in its 10-year history, the notoriously finicky organization has embraced corporate partners like Whole Foods, Anolon cookware and the Food Network.
The Slow Food faithful say they want the festival to be the Woodstock of food, a profound event where a broad band of people will see that delicious, sustainably produced food can be a prism for social, ecological and political change.
They also realize that it may be their best chance to prove that Slow Food, as a movement, is not just one big wine tasting with really hard to find cheeses that you weren’t invited to.
The American wing of the Slow Food movement, which began in Italy in 1986, has a tendency to polarize people. When it first took root here in 1998, some people were drawn to its philosophy, while others were put off by what they saw as elitism and an inflated sense of importance.
Slow Food’s leaders, the chef Alice Waters chief among them, bristle at the criticism. But most acknowledge that the organization did not translate well to an American audience. As a result, it has never had as much cultural or political impact as its parent group in Europe.
Now, they say, the organization is getting a makeover. And the festival in San Francisco will be the perfect place to show off a more inclusive and more politically attuned Slow Food USA.
“I don’t know if it’s going to be the youthful, happening Woodstock they want it to be, but it certainly has the potential,” said Corby Kummer, a food columnist, book author and Slow Food board member. “It will be a failure if it is only well-dressed people over 35 from the Bay Area treating it as if it’s another Ferry Plaza Farmers Market” — a reference to the place where well-fed San Franciscans and celebrity farmers chat over perfect peaches and soft, ripe cheese.
Carlo Petrini, a charismatic Italian who writes about food and wine, started Slow Food with friends who shared his notion that left wing politics and gastronomic pleasure could be happily married. The international organization has grown to 86,000 members and become an industry in Mr. Petrini’s hometown, Bra, Italy. There are Slow Food restaurants, a university and a hotel. You can buy a cashmere truffle-hunting vest embroidered with the Slow Food snail logo at the main office in Bra.
The group’s budget is about $39 million, and subsidized by the Italian government. Much of the organization’s work involves identifying traditional foods, like Ethiopian white honey or Amalfi sfusato lemons, and designing ways to help the people who produce them.
Its philosophy — that food is about much more than cooking and eating — is often hammered home by Mr. Petrini on his frequent trips around the world.
“I always say a gastronome who isn’t an environmentalist is just stupid, and I say an environmentalist who isn’t a gastronome is just sad,” he said through an interpreter in an interview last year.
In the late 1990s, Mr. Petrini’s ideas were quickly embraced by people on America’s coasts who were fans of farmers’ markets, local food and a slower, more reflective way of life. Ms. Waters, who had spent more than two decades advocating delicious organic food and the small farms that grew it, was among them.
“I heard him for the first time and I just fell for him,” she said. “I thought, oh, my God. We are soul mates.”
Most of Slow Food’s achievements in its first years in the United States were intellectual. It easily won new converts like the authors Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan to its critique of the status quo in American food.
“Slow Food came on as a way to influence the system through small, enlightened groups,” said Bill Niman, the California rancher. “For me, any effort or movement that helps motivate people to ask where does this come from and where is it raised is very important.”
Slow Food gathered critics quickly, too. Those who embraced the Eurocentric Slow Food model struck some as cliquish and snobby.
“I do slow food. Why should I join it?” said John Scharffenberger, who made his name producing sparkling wine and chocolate in Northern California. “But I think it is a really good way to promote Italian food.”
Outside of the tight culinary circles of San Francisco and New York, people seemed to have a hard time figuring out exactly what Slow Food did. Some farmers and producers perceived its members as dilettantes who traveled the countryside “discovering” Berkshire pigs and heirloom tomatoes and old apple orchards.
Steven Shaw, a food writer and a founder of the food Web site eGullet, said Slow Food succeeded early on because it mixed hedonism with a leftist political agenda. But, he contends, its strong antitechnology, antiglobalization views are lost on the average member.
“Most people I know who go to Slow Food events are the culinary equivalents of the guys in college who go to protests to meet girls,” he said. “They couldn’t care less about the ideology.”
In the spring, several bloggers faced off over charges that the international organization was nothing but a collection of jet-setting food theorists. Brahm Ahmadi, the executive director of the People’s Grocery, a community organization that works to get healthy food into poor parts of Oakland, Calif., wrote in his blog that Slow Food lacked “economic and racial diversity.”
Katrina Heron, the chairwoman of the board that is running the Slow Food Nation festival, said Slow Food USA is trying to become more inclusive and develop an identity distinct from the parent group. “It had an awkward landing from the beginning,” she said. “There was kind of this problem in translation.”
Ms. Heron believes Slow Food Nation will be a turning point. Festival leaders have courted Mr. Ahmadi and others to lead panels on hunger, race and poverty. The group has also hired a “justice director” to make the conference more diverse.
She and other Slow Food leaders say that many of the 200 United States convivia — the term the organization uses instead of chapters — are doing important work in places where like-minded people might not otherwise have found one another. There are five chapters in Iowa, for example, including one in Des Moines started by Neil Hamilton, a gentleman farmer and director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University Law School.
“Farmers’ market vendors and farmers are not always the most organized,” he said. “Slow Food has provided an organizational place for all these folks to come together and support each other.”
Slow Food has helped build gardens in schoolyards, and it came to the rescue in post-Katrina Louisiana, raising about $50,000 to help restaurants reopen, farmers replant and shrimpers buy new equipment, among other things. New Orleans’s premier farmers’ market reopened a couple of months after the storm, largely through the sheer will of Slow Food members.
Slow Food also helped popularize the word “heritage,” now commonly used to describe certain breeds of pigs and even fruit. The group’s effort in 2001 to help a breeder sell his rare, old-fashioned turkeys — he called them heritage turkeys — became a cause célèbre that Thanksgiving.
But leaders realize Slow Food USA must do more if it is going to grow much beyond the 16,000 members it has now and build enough political muscle to help reform the food system.
“To change consumer buying habits and to get people to think differently about where their food comes from is one thing,” Ms. Heron said. “But that’s not the main event. The success of Slow Food Nation depends on political leaders taking up this issue.”
Meanwhile, Slow Food USA itself is trying to change, said Erika Lesser, the executive director of the national organization, which is based in Brooklyn.
“This is really a coming-of-age moment for us where we are trying to define who we are in the United States,” she said.
To that end, Slow Food USA is adding college chapters, reorganizing its internal structure and dropping the term convivium in favor of the more American-sounding chapter.
Even Ms. Waters, who is a vice president of Slow Food’s international board, realizes that her beloved cause has to invite some new guests to the table.
And it appears many of them will be showing up on Labor Day weekend.
“All I can say is, there are enough really beautiful people coming for it to be bigger than the sum of its parts,” Ms. Waters said. “If 60,000 people do come, and we’re all in front of City Hall, and it’s a beautiful night, well, who knows what could happen.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/dining/23slow.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=printBOWDOINHAM, Maine - Ben Dobson is betting his future on 170 acres of salad greens along the shores of Merrymeeting Bay.
The 24-year-old oversees New England's first large-scale organic farm dedicated to supplying East Coast supermarkets and restaurant chains with local greens.
The start-up farm, called Locally Known, is trying to capitalize on soaring fuel costs and growing consumer demand for local, organic foods by offering fresher lettuce at competitive prices.
Most salad greens make a cross-country trek of more than 3,000 miles from California's Salinas Valley, nicknamed "Salad Bowl of the World," to get to Boston. Locally Known's produce, however, traveled just 144 miles from Maine to hit the shelves last week at Whole Foods supermarkets. And five ounces cost $1 less than the same amount of greens from California-based Earthbound Farm, a savings largely due to lower transportation costs.
"This is absolutely huge. What Locally Known is attempting has never really been done before on the East Coast to this level," said Bill McGowan, Whole Foods' produce coordinator for the North Atlantic region. "At this time, trucking greens from California, the primary grower, to the East Coast is not great from a fuel standpoint and a green-mission standpoint."
Until now, it has been nearly impossible for small local farmers to supply major supermarket chains because of costly food safety requirements, restrictions that grew more stringent following the 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach. But with an investment from a group of entrepreneurs under the age of 30, along with a $250,000 grant from Maine's agriculture department, Locally Known built a processing plant that washes, dries, and packages the greens to meet industry standards.
Much of the harvest is automated, with band saws on wheels, allowing a crew of three and machines to do the work of 50 people picking lettuce by hand. At full capacity, Locally Known expects to harvest about 60,000 pounds of greens each week, including spinach, arugula, and baby kale. The produce will supply retailers such as Whole Foods, Trader Joes, and Hannafords.
"We can offer fresher greens that sit on the truck less time and can be identified with the local farm connection," said Dobson, president of Locally Known. "And we can offer it at competitive prices."
Locally Known's 170 acres pale in comparison to lettuce farms in California, which can sprawl over more than 2,000 acres. But Dobson, who grew up working on his father's farm in the Berkshires, is looking to lease land in Florida to harvest in the winter. Ultimately, he wants to build a cooperative across the region to create a sustainable year-round supply of produce for the East Coast sold under the Locally Known label.
Soaring costs for fuel and petroleum-based fertilizers used in conventional farming have made local organic produce a more competitive option for supermarket chains and restaurants, said Brook DeLorme, who at 28 is the oldest of Locally Known's five partners.
According to the market research publisher Packaged Facts, sales of locally grown foods in the United States were expected to rise from about $4 billion in 2002 to $7 billion by 2011. Locally Known said it is not trying to steal the market from local farms that supply small health food stores and nearby restaurants. Instead, it is focusing on major supermarket chains.
"More and more of the larger food services and retailers are rethinking their sourcing. They're paying more attention as fuel prices soar, and regional distribution appears to make the most financial sense," said Rich Pirog, associate director at Iowa State University's Leopold Center, which does research to develop sustainable agricultural practices.
A Leopold study conducted several years ago found that conventional produce traveled an average of 1,518 miles to reach Chicago, with grapes, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower traveling over 2,000 miles.
This month, the Massachusetts Restaurant Association hosted a "Green Restaurant Revolution" event, featuring media mogul turned restaurateur Ted Turner and local celebrity chef Todd English talking about ways restaurateurs can focus on environmental stewardship and local sustainability. English, in an interview, said local sourcing is increasingly important because of rising food prices and fuel surcharges.
"You have to be smarter, look harder for the best buys out there," English said. "And buying local just makes sense; it's fresher and you're supporting the local economy."
In Bowdoinham, Dobson is working nearly 20 hours a day, every day, to keep the farm on track. But lettuce is growing faster than expected, a salad spinner broke down last week, and bar-coding software he passed on to save money is now desperately needed. Adding to his stress is a planned visit by Maine's governor this week.
"It's a lot of chance," Dobson said, as he peered out onto his farm, acres of peppery arugula and spinach stretching into the distance. "But we think it's the right opportunity at the right time."
Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.
CASSANDRA FEELEY prefers organic ingredients, especially for her baby, but she finds it hard to manage on her husband’s salary as an Army sergeant. So this year she did something she has wanted to do for a long time: she planted vegetables in her yard to save money.
“One organic cucumber is $3 and I can produce it for pennies,” she said.
For her first garden, Ms. Feeley has gone whole hog, hand-tilling a quarter acre in the backyard of her house near the Fort Campbell Army base in Kentucky. She has put in 15 tomato plants, five rows of corn, potatoes, cucumbers, squash, okra, peas, watermelon, green beans. An old barn on the property has been converted to a chicken coop, its residents arriving next month; the goats will be arriving next year.
“I spent $100 on it and I know I will save at least $75 a month on food,” she said.
She is one of the growing number of Americans who, driven by higher grocery costs and a stumbling economy, have taken up vegetable gardening for the first time. Others have increased the size of their existing gardens.
Seed companies and garden shops say that not since the rampant inflation of the 1970s has there been such an uptick in interest in growing food at home. Space in community gardens across the country has been sold out for several months. In Austin, Tex., some of the gardens have a three-year waiting list.
George C. Ball Jr., owner of the W. Atlee Burpee Company, said sales of vegetable and herb seeds and plants are up by 40 percent over last year, double the annual growth for the last five years. “You don’t see this kind of thing but once in a career,” he said. Mr. Ball offers half a dozen reasons for the phenomenon, some of which have been building for the last few years, like taste, health and food safety, plus concern, especially among young people, about global warming.
But, Mr. Ball said, “The big one is the price spike.” The striking rise in the cost of staples like bread and milk has been accompanied by increases in the price of fruits and vegetables.
“Food prices have spiked because of fuel prices and they redounded to the benefit of the garden,” Mr. Ball said. “People are driving less, taking fewer vacations, so there is more time to garden.”
Each spring for the last five years, the Garden Writers Association has had TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, a polling firm, conduct a national consumer telephone survey asking gardeners what makes up the greatest share of their garden budgets. “The historic priorities are lawns, annuals, perennials, then vegetables, followed by trees and shrubs,” said Robert LaGasse, executive director of the association. This year, vegetables went from fourth place to second, which Mr. LaGasse called “an enormous attitude shift.”
People like Rita Gartin of Ames, Iowa, are part of that shift. Last year she kept a small garden. This year it has tripled in size into a five-by-seven-foot plot because, Ms. Gartin said, “The cost of everything is going up and I was looking to lose a few pounds, too; so it’s a win-win situation all around.”
Ms. Gartin, who fits gardening into her 12-hour workday as an interior designer and property manager, is not intimidated by the 20 kinds of vegetables she has planted: she was raised on a farm with a giant garden. A fence has been erected to keep the deer and people out, and it’s where the pole beans and snap peas are already climbing.
She is ready to take a stab at canning, but reserves the right to freeze everything instead, she said.
“I probably spent maybe $50 for everything and that’s less than a week’s cost of groceries or the price of a gym,” she said.
Seed companies and garden centers say they didn’t see the rush coming. There wasn’t any buildup last year, said Barbara Melera, the co-owner of the D. Landreth Seed Company in New Freedom, Pa., who takes the pulse of gardeners at the 13 garden shows she attends around the country each year.
“We pack for all the shows and bring 16 different beans, 10 packets for each kind,” Ms. Melera said. In earlier years, by the time the shows end in March, she said, “we are lucky if we have sold two of the 10 packets.”
“This year,” she said, “we sold out the first show and literally sold hundreds. We never sell any corn; this year we sold out of corn by the end of the season. We saw the same thing in the mail order business.”
She said the greatest demand was for what she calls “survival vegetables”: peas, beans, corn, beets, carrots, broccoli, kale, spinach and the lettuces. “It was so different from what it has been in prior years,” she added.
Randy Martell, one of the owners of the Garden Factory in Rochester, says it isn’t just vegetables. “The potted fruit trees were sold out by the first week of May,” he said. “Blueberries, raspberries and grapes are sold out. I think those sales have doubled. Overall sales are up about 30 percent.”
Dottie Wright, greenhouse manager at one of the Dammann’s Lawn, Garden and Landscaping Centers in Indianapolis, said she talks to people every day who are starting their first vegetable garden. “If they don’t have a yard they try containers for tomatoes and herbs. We can’t keep the herbs in this year.”
Thrilled as gardening experts are about this phenomenon, they know that many first timers don’t have any idea how much sweat equity is involved.
“Many people I sold seeds to have never gardened before,” Ms. Melera said, “and we have to find a way to educate them so the experience is successful. They have got to be taught.”
Mr. Ball of Burpee knows some of the new gardeners won’t stick with gardening beyond the first year. “Some people can’t get with the idea of digging a hole; getting buggy, sticky and hot,” he said. “Gardening is an active hobby; it’s a commitment.”
Doreen G. Howard, a former garden editor for Woman’s Day and now a writer for The American Gardener, is one of the committed. She has had a vegetable garden for most of the last 25 years. This year she has quadrupled the size of her vegetable plot in Roscoe, Ill., because of the economy and because she thinks the quality of store-bought produce has deteriorated. Once vegetables were just 5 percent of her garden; now they are 20 percent.
“Food prices have gotten to the point where we are seeing the difference,” she said. “It’s pushing our budget and we are a two-income family. It was never a concern before.” Ms. Howard said her grocery bill for two went from $100 a week to $140 a week this year.
She has chosen many vegetables that freeze well, investing in a secondhand freezer to store the bounty. She plans to dry the herbs that grow on the back porch next to boxes of mesclun, and to make pickles from the cucumbers and raisins from the grapes — her newest addition. And she is looking forward to a cellar full of Peruvian blue potatoes.
Some of Ms. Howard’s increased harvest will also go to food pantries through an organization called Plant a Row for the Hungry, which encourages gardeners to plant extra vegetables to share with the poor.
“I’m hoping to take $20 a week off my grocery bill,” she said. This is in the low range, according to Mr. Ball, who says a $100 investment will produce $1,000 to $1,700 worth of vegetables.
Ms. Gartin, now in her second year, says gardening is worth the effort.
“I got soft calluses from hoeing and digging,” she said, adding cheerfully, “but my fingernails are still pretty — long and not chipped. I probably spent 30 hours putting the garden in, and when I’d come into the house I’d be covered in sweat. But now it’s pretty easy because of all the rain we’ve had.”
And the vegetables, she said, are “awesome.” “It’s a totally different flavor from what you buy in the store. It’s exciting to go out and pick the fruits of your labor.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/dining/11garden.html?em&ex=1213329600&en=57da52d982ec3b3c&ei=5087%0A
