Americans fed up with high produce costs turn to planting gardens

NEW YORK — Just beneath an L train subway platform in Brooklyn, Tanika Gentry fingers the deep-green leaves of a collard plant in the black soil of a community garden.

This is dinner.

Gentry, fed up with the spiking cost of food, recently decided to grow her own.

Now she is reaping a harvest of collards, cabbages, tomatoes and pumpkins to feed her family.

"Once you have to choose between eating and fuel, there's nothing greater than going back to the beginning and making your own," said Gentry, 32, who home-schools her two daughters. "With the way things are going, it may be something a lot more people are realistically doing."

From Atlanta to Seattle, people are reacting to the stagnant economy and the high cost of produce by planting their own fruits and vegetables, say garden-store owners, bulk seed sellers and industry analysts.

In the skyscrapered canyons of New York City, increasing numbers of people are growing their food on fire escapes, on rooftops, in backyards and in community gardens.

It is a phenomenon that has always ebbed and flowed with the economy, said Bruce Butterfield, the market research director of the National Gardening Association, who has been tracking it for decades. The biggest recent peak in homegrown food came in 1975, during a national oil crisis, he said, when 49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables.

There were Liberty Gardens to help during World War I, and World War II inspired Victory Gardens, which produced an estimated 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the country in 1943. The Great Depression spawned Relief Gardens in the 1930s, and in 1974 President Ford encouraged Whip Inflation Now, or WIN, Gardens.

Last year, Butterfield said, about 22 percent of U.S. households — including many in cities and suburbs — grew vegetables, spending an average of $58 to do so, up from $48 per household in 2006.

Butterfield expects that number will be significantly higher this year.

The reasons vary but include increasing interest in the quality and environmental impact of food. Recently, money has become a bigger factor.

Nationally, people are growing more vegetables and fruits than flowers for the first time in at least a decade, said Scott Meyer, editor of Organic Gardening magazine.

"This year, it's really exploded," he said. "It's not only the high cost of food, but the high cost of every other activity. People are staying around their homes and looking to do things they find rewarding."

George Ball, chairman of W. Atlee Burpee, the country's largest seed company, said he has seen a 30 to 40 percent increase in vegetable-seed sales this year.

"I think the thing that tipped the scale was the fuel and food costs," he said. "This is a big deal for middle-class people." He estimates that every dollar invested in seeds can become $20 worth of produce.

A national survey of nurseries found that vegetables and their seeds "flew off the shelves," this year, said Robert LaGasse, executive director of the Garden Writers Association.

In Minneapolis, Karen O'Connor, who co-owns Mother Earth Gardens, said she cannot keep pace with the demand. "We ordered three times as many fruit trees as ever before," she said. "We sold out of all the vegetables in June — seeds, too."

In Seattle, Marguerite Lynch, an interior designer, put up a sign on a 10- by 40-foot strip on her driveway saying, "We're sick of rising fuel and food prices so we're turning this weed patch into a vegetable garden. Want to help?"

A week later, she had five volunteers. She ordered organic vegetable compost, delivered in two giant dump trucks, and soon had a bed in which to plant beets, basil, Swiss chard, bush beans, peas, acorn squash, pumpkin and kale.