Victory for Gardens
By Karey Sharp
June 12, 2020
Crouching in the dirt, pulling weeds and planting seeds can serve the role of outdoor play, relaxation and a mood stabilizer during this time of isolation. While wandering through the neighborhoods of Bellingham, Washington, walkers may notice people flocking to their yards to dig, plant and harvest in an effort to have homegrown food on their plates.
“Everybody’s wondering, ‘Oh my god! What do I do? I have to stay in my house, I can’t go to work.’ And all these questions are beginning to pop up,” said Meg Duke, the volunteer coordinator at the Alternative Library.
The Alternative Library is a nonprofit, volunteer-run library that hosts musical performances and art shows and is geared toward subculture movements. Now, one of those movements is gardening.
With many people out of work and financially stressed due to COVID-19, gardening to provide a source of food has become more appealing, said Nate Kleinman, a co-founder of the Experimental Farms Network. Kleinman believes this resurgence of gardening may be larger than the Victory Garden movement during World War I and World War II.
The Victory Garden movement emerged during the food crisis caused by war effort and rationing. At one point, 40% of American vegetables were grown in home and community gardens, according to a 2009 paper in the Food and Drug Journal. However, due to inexperience, many of the gardens shriveled away like dried leaves. Now, with increased access to information via the internet, more first-time gardeners have the chance to create fruitful gardens, said Kleinman.
Kleinman is the project organizer for Cooperative Gardens Commission, a national initiative based out of Philadelphia that concentrates on supporting communities already experiencing food insecurity. Part of their mission is to connect people across the country with local gardening experts.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimated over 37 million Americans were facing food insecurity. That means in a classroom of 24 students, about three lack the food needed to maintain health and energy. During this pandemic global poverty rates could rise, which hasn’t happened since 1990, according to a 2020 United Nations University report. Fruit and vegetable gardening supports healthy eating, saves money and could provide income for people with successful gardens, said Kleinman.
“Lots of people are worried about the food supply, so they’re ordering seeds,” said Kleinman.
Some big seed companies around the country are experiencing a tenfold increase in seed sales, according to Kleinman. The small seed company, Experimental Farms Network, where Kleinman works has seen a threefold increase.
Flyers posted on telephone poles around Bellingham read ‘Food not Lawn’ in big black letters. Food not Lawn, started by volunteers at the Alternative Library, connects volunteers willing to build raised garden beds with people who want to use their yard to grow food. So far, they have built five garden beds and five more are in the works.
The goal is for each small community in Bellingham to develop their own group of volunteers to build garden beds. This started as a reaction to the insecurity people felt during the pandemic, said Duke.
Duke’s tone was casual as she stretched out her legs. She spoke passionately about food security issues. To Duke, this is not just a one-time immediate fix to one problem. Gardening is a lifestyle change that can help combat the costs of growing and shipping food commercially and fight the impending threats of climate change, said Duke.
Kelsey Tribble is one local gardener to benefit from the Alternative Library’s project. For the past 10 years, Tribble gardened on and off depending on her access to space. Now armed with a yard of her own, she decided the best use of the space is a food forest. A food forest is a form of gardening that takes on the structure of a forest and, once planted, doesn’t take much added energy or water.
Tribble now has a few garden beds where grass once grew. They’re bordered by dead wood from her yard that will eventually become soil. The food forest is a long-term goal, said Tribble. Right now, she just wants to have some home-grown food over the summer.
Gardening is something Tribble enjoys. It’s no chore.
“Dirt is like the antidote to smart devices,” said Tribble. She notices that people “are becoming more and more like androids.”
People around the country are grabbing shovels, pulling on gardening gloves and asking: “How can we as a community of smart, caring individuals seize on this crisis and turn it into an opportunity so that we come out of it even more resilient than we were before?” said Laura Plaut, the executive director of Common Threads Farm.
Common Threads is a nonprofit focused on teaching children how to grow, cook and eat fresh, healthy foods.
The organization recently got permission from the Bellingham School District to expand the school garden at Whatcom Middle School, said Plaut. The Bellingham Food Bank and School District have really stepped up to the plate in providing food for the local community, according to Plaut. As they struggled to meet the increased demands for meals during this pandemic, the quality of food and access to fresh veggies went down, said Plaut. Common Threads saw this as an opportunity to supply people with as many fresh vegetables as they could.
It’s not too late in the season to begin learning, sharing and digging into the world of self-sufficiency, said Plaut.
Duke hopes the seeds planted this year will carry this new-found gardening enthusiasm beyond a single season and the eventual end of the pandemic. “I think we all have to hope that lessons we learn in hard times stick around when the hard times go away,” she said.