Think globally, grow locally

Mention gardening these days, and folks are most likely to equate it with vegetable gardening.

Just recently, that wasn't so.

Vegetable gardening had become almost passe, relegated to the back of the back yard. Declaring yourself a gardener a few years ago more often meant you had an assortment of perennials and other ornamentals.

"Vegetable gardening really declined in the 1980s," says Barbara Damrosch, author of "The Garden Primer" (Workman, $18.95 paperback, 832 pages). "Everybody got sort of yuppie and urban, and didn't do things like growing food. But that's totally changed, and people are again thinking about growing their own food."

The reasons, she says, are people realized they'd lost touch with their food supply, and they also discovered it could no longer be trusted to deliver quality or even nutritious food.

"People suddenly realized how far those vegetables had been trucked and they made the connection between, 'Yes, it's cheap food, but if we as taxpayers have to pay the environmental costs and the medical costs, then it's not a bargain,' " Damrosch says.

Not only are more people turning to vegetable gardening, but younger people, the 20-somethings, are getting into gardening, says Scott Meyer, editor of Organic Gardening.

"Twenty years ago it used to be mostly older men who grew a lot of vegetables, and women were more interested in flowers, but that's changing, especially among younger women who are serious about growing their own food.

"The best story one can tell is that, 'I planted these seeds myself and grew this crop,' " Meyer says. "Vegetable gardening is something you can do that feels satisfying and gives you a direct connection to the Earth itself."

People are also shopping at farmers markets more and more. They want locally produced food, Damrosch says.

Both Meyer and Damrosch pointed to the growing interest in schoolyard gardening across the country.

"We get calls all the time from parents, teachers and administrators who want to know how to create edible gardens for schools," Damrosch says. "We even get calls from students at universities who want their schools to have their own farm, who want fresher, safer, locally produced food in their dining halls."

It's a political issue with them, Damrosch says.

"They're not doing it the same way kids in the '60s did, where they chucked everything to go back to the boonies. These are urban techies who have their Blackberries and iPods but want to learn how to grow broccoli. These are the same kids who have suddenly taken up knitting and all these cozy cottage crafts. Growing food is part of that. They want real food."

And Meyer says: "While tomatoes remain the No. 1 crop among home gardeners, lettuce and salad greens are overtaking peppers, which has long been the No. 2 crop. Greens don't take a lot of room. You can grow them in a window box or a pot on the deck. They might even replace tomatoes as the No. 1 crop."

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)