'I GROW TOMATOES, YOU GROW CARROTS'
With so many digging into gardening for the first time, there has also been a push to pool resources and collective knowledge on home food production.
Nathan Kleinman, co-director of Philadelphia-based Experimental Farm Network, said more than 2,000 people signed up and attended weekly calls to discuss gardening best practices as they begin putting seeds in the ground.
"The reaction was overwhelming," Kleinman said. "It struck a nerve with a lot of people."
Melanie Pittman, an teacher who lives on 5 acres near Crete, Illinois, said while everyone was stocking up on toilet paper, her partner ran over to the local home improvement store to stock up on seeds and gardening tools.
Pittman is more than doubling her garden, planting corn, beans, tomatoes, potatoes, onions and growing mushrooms. She is also working with other growers in her community to expand her reliance on local food.
“I try to reach out to other individuals who are growing food in the area, to avoid the overlap - ‘I grow tomatoes, you grow carrots,'” she said.
Gardening may be a rare positive trend to emerge from the crippling pandemic, said Diane Blazek, executive director of the U.S. industry group National Garden Bureau.
"We'll come out in the end and hopefully everyone will be eating better and gardening more and more self-reliant," she said.
