Gardening | Vegetable Gardening Gains Ground In Erie
Vegetable gardens went out of style for a while, but they’re going gangbusters now.
Ask anyone who does it, and you’ll get an earful about why: They say it costs less to grow than buy produce, it’s fresher, it tastes better, it prevents environmental damage, it’s healthier.
And if you ask Kathy Mosier, a first-timer and mother of two, she’ll tell you it’s pretty easy, too.
“I didn’t think it would ever grow,” she said with a laugh. “I was amazed that the seeds came up and grew into plants,” she said.
“I have a smaller yard, and you just get busy, and I never did (garden). I didn’t think I’d have the time.”
Mosier never had a vegetable garden until her sister, Kim Zacherl, who has grown vegetables for 25 years, dragged her to a raised-bed gardening class at Asbury Woods Nature Center in the spring.
Mosier got a raised-bed kit, pretty much to appease her sister, but now she’s hooked.
“This was so successful, I want to put more time into it,” she said. “I’m going to continue on doing it. I think I have room for another” garden.
That’s music to longtime gardeners’ ears.
Rochelle Krowinski, a retired registered nurse and hospital administrator, can’t remember a time in her life when she didn’t tend a vegetable garden. Now she has three vast fields of sweet corn, herbs, peppers, beets, tomatoes, squash, pumpkins, beans, onions, potatoes and more.
As she showed off her bounty, granddaughter Savanna Krowinski, 2, ate a bright red Roma tomato out of hand like an apple.
“It’s a way of life,” Krowinski said with her arm around the tot. “It’s an act of love. It’s my soul food.”
That feeling lasts all year, thanks to her freezing and canning skills.
“In the middle of winter, when you pull it out, it’s really a gift,” Krowinski said.
Bean counting
Vegetable gardening has taken off in measurable ways. According to a Garden Media Group survey taken in spring, 43 percent of gardeners planned to add a vegetable garden this year. Also, 19 percent of gardeners planned to add an herb garden.
Burpee, a 135-year-old seed and plant company in the Philadelphia area, saw a 30 percent increase in business in 2009 and no falloff since then.
“Interest in homegrown and fresh local foods is no longer a trend that may fall out of style,” said Chelsey Fields, vegetable produce manger for Burpee. “It has become a way of life for folks in rural and urban areas.”
Burpee watched the sale of herbs soar in spring.
“Herb orders really took off right after the late March news reports about the 2011 White House garden,” said Burpee Chairman George Ball.
Bob Bonadio, who co-owns Erie’s Nickel Plate Mills with his wife, Gretchen, said vegetable gardening is taking a bite out of flowers and landscaping.
“We’ve seen it over the last three years,” he said, and these aren’t gardening veterans who are moving the needle.
“We have a lot of folks that we’re kind of schooling on what to do and what to plant,” Bonadio said.
Where did it go?
Vegetable gardening was big in the mid-1900s, before two-income families became the norm. When both parents began working, time spent at home was at a premium.
Vegetable gardening “really skipped a generation,” said Zacherl, a married, stay-at-home mother of two, who has been gardening for 25 years. “It’s all about time.”
While time is still precious,
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