Join the growing trend by starting your own garden

Gardening has long struggled with an image problem that involves a certain amount of dowdiness. But in case you hadn’t heard, that’s no longer an issue. These days, gardening is all the rage.

People who have never sown a seed are taking up gardening. Seed companies report record sales and some have had to shut down online ordering for a time just to keep up. It turns out that a pandemic is good for the gardening business.

It should come as no surprise that people want to grow their own food right now. Trips to the grocery store are not so simple anymore, and after several rounds of foodborne illness linked to lettuce in the past couple years, knowing where your food comes from has become more important.

This newfound interest in gardening is so prevalent that the nonprofit National Garden Bureau has started calling it Victory Garden 2.0. The original victory garden movement began in World War I when Americans were called on to grow food wherever they could, and it gained prominence during World War II when the effort was so popular that about 40% of the country’s fresh vegetables were grown in home, school and community gardens.

Today’s victory gardens probably won’t come close to that kind of production, but they may do something even more important because I believe that if people give gardening a try, there’s a good chance they’ll be hooked for life. And more gardeners means more plants growing and that’s better all around.

 My advice to new gardeners is to start small. Don’t take a backhoe to the yard right out of the gate. The time for rental equipment will come later. When I say small, I mean really small — in a container. Just about anything will work as a container to grow plants in so long as you can drill some holes for drainage in the bottom, but bigger is better. Five-gallon buckets work well for a small tomato plant. Bigger pots like galvanized tubs can be called into service as well. Small pots rarely have enough room for roots and will dry out so quickly you’ll become a slave to watering.

My favorite get-gardening-quickly project is to plant cut-and-come again lettuces (sometimes called leaf lettuce or mesclun mixes). Lettuce can grow in shallow containers, even as shallow as 5 inches deep, so grab just about anything that fits the bill. Drill some holes in the bottom for lots of good drainage. Fill it up with potting mix and moisten the soil. Then sprinkle lettuce seeds on it and just press them into the soil gently.

Put the container in a partly sunny area (you can even push this to partly shaded later in the season when it gets hotter out) and keep the soil moist, but don’t wash away the seeds. In a little over a week you’ll have sprouts. When the lettuces get about 4 inches tall, you can start harvesting by just cutting what you need.

Once you taste lettuce you’ve grown yourself, you’ll never want to buy it at the store again. Look at it this way, you’re not just growing your own food, you’re at the forefront of a trend.