This spring, garden with a purpose

Posted: Saturday, March 19, 2011 By KATHRYN CATES MOORE / Lincoln Journal Star , JournalStar.com

Pick your purpose.

Everyone has different reasons for getting outside and getting dirty. For some, it is purely recreational — they love being in their yards, and growing vegetables or beautiful flowers is merely a delightful byproduct.

For others, gardening is a way to show their greener side, connect to nature and be in sync with their environment, perhaps planting a xeriscape with succulents to conserve water.

Still other gardeners take pride in their green thumbs and are planting their yards with vegetables, fruits and herbs because they like the homegrown varieties and taste, preferring to monitor their food’s growing conditions.

Gardening with a purpose is one of the top garden trends for 2011, according to research by the Garden Media Group. How you interpret that trend in your own garden plot is a personal choice — like a preference for Beefsteak tomatoes over Early Girl or petunias over roses.

“Nutrition is high on people’s mind,” said Luann Finke of Finke Gardens and Nursery. “Growing your own food is the ultimate way to control what goes into it.” At home, you have complete control of amendments to the soil, fertilizers and disease treatment.

The popular “grow local” movement absolutely applies to your own backyard. According to the GMG survey, three-fourths of those who grow their own vegetables do so for better quality, taste and nutrition. And almost half also believe it is cheaper than buying from a store.

Finke Gardens is responding to requests from local gardeners who want beautiful options as well as those that enrich their lives, she said.

“Everyone’s time is limited,” she said, “so gardening with a dual purpose makes sense.”

At a recent demonstration, she presented window boxes filled with herbs and lettuce. “Space is limited for some people, too.”

She recently worked with a client who had young children and specific landscape requests to include a child-friendly garden space and fruit trees.

“Customers want more in their yards,” Finke said.

Communities are seeing more requests for purposeful gardening, too.

When Community Crops began in 2003, it offered only one site for gardeners who didn’t have space to garden, said Ingrid Kirst, the group’s executive director.

This season, the organization has 15 sites, totally more than 50,000 square feet of growing space, and seven of those are already full, she said. Sizes and prices for the lots vary; the least expensive is $50 and the most expensive is $100 for the season. Community Crops provides access to water and tools, and hoses are on site because “people who live in apartments don’t have storage room for those.”

The gardeners’ reasons vary, Kirst said. Some are refugees and immigrants who use their plots to grow produce from their home countries that are not available in Lincoln grocery stores. Some are families who have shady, non-garden-friendly backyards, or apartment dwellers who want more than a container of cherry tomato plants can offer.

All of those differences, bound by a common desire to grow produce, “creates a community,” Kirst said. And a “craving for community” is among the reasons for gardening and “living local” in the GMG survey.

The National Arbor Day Foundation decided to put its environmental beliefs out there for all to see — on its roof in Lincoln. Last September, more than 7,300 square feet of garden space was planted as a “green roof,” according to Mark Derowitsch of the foundation.

The roof, which mostly was dormant over the winter, can be seen from the downtown Qdoba restaurant’s rooftop patio. It’s planted with sedum, small shrubs and native grasses. The grasses are part of a test plot monitored by Richard Sutton, University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor of agronomy and horticulture.

Eco-scaping with sustainable landscapes — on the roof or elsewhere — is another of the trends named by the GMG survey.

That’s the thing about gardening: There are so many ways to express yourself, from front-yard vegetable growing to neighborhood plant swaps to planting a single fruit tree.

Gardeners are raising their trowels for a purpose this season. Deciding on your purpose and how to express it is up to you.

http://journalstar.com/lifestyles/home-and-garden/article_9cb42798-8ae7-5d1d-820c-ec8d78304620.html