CT OUTDOORS ~ Gardening: This Year's Hot Trend

Between my weekly radio show and writing for the Times weeklies, I talk with plenty of gardeners. The old adage goes that you ask three gardeners for advice and you’ll get at least five opinions of what to grow and how to grow it.

But that’s part of the fun of gardening—sharing ideas and, as often as not, seedlings, cuttings, and divided plants. If you’re lucky, there will be some ripe homegrown tomatoes before summer is over.

There’s consensus in the gardening world this year: gardening is the next hot trend. People who never even lifted a hoe before are flocking into garden centers, snapping up everything from vegetable seeds to perennials promised to draw butterflies and birds to their yards.

Teri Smith, who owns and runs Smith’s Acres in Niantic with her husband “Farmer Joe,” has been seeing it firsthand this year.

“There’s more interest in organics, using natural fertilizers and pest controls, as well as in growing your own food,” Smith said. In anticipation of the growing interest, the Smiths have been growing extra varieties of vegetable seedlings, including heirloom tomatoes, on their farm in East Lyme.

P. Allen Smith, the nationally-recognized celebrity gardener and designer, sees the same interest, too, across the country.

“Vegetable gardening has gone through the roof,” Smith said on my radio show last week. Smith recently published Bringing the Garden Indoors, the fifth book in his series that parallels his PBS television show.

Even in this down economy, or perhaps because of it, Smith said, the green industry has seen 20 to 25 percent increases in traffic and sales of vegetable seeds and gardening supplies.

“People are very concerned about where their food comes from,” said the Arkansas-based Smith, who travels back to New York City a couple of times each month to do some urban gardening for NBC’s Today show.

His advice for novices is to keep it easy and simple—not a bad strategy for all gardeners.

“You need early successes; start with containers if you haven’t gardened much,” he said, recommending Swiss chard and butterhead lettuces as attractive container crops, as well as arugula.

“You can almost sit there and watch arugula sprout. It takes only six to eight days to grow a crop of microgreens.

Teri Smith agrees and says herbs and vegetables make great companions in containers.

“Variegated oregano and golden marjoram are fantastic in containers,” she said. She has been potting up combinations of herbs and violas, little spring pansy blossoms that also are edible. She teams up bronze fennel, with its tall wispy plums, with blooming annuals and trailing vines in large containers.

“Put some red and green lettuce in window and deck boxes with your annual flowers, and you can enjoy a salad, as well as the blooms,” she said. 

Raised beds are another way to contain the vegetable garden at a manageable size and make it look more like part of the landscape. Another trick the Arkansas Smith recommends is growing potatoes in old bushel baskets.

“Knock off the bottom of the basket, fill it up half-way with a good compost, plant a Kennebec potato, a 1948 heirloom, top it off with more compost, and in 110 days you’ll have eight to 10 potatoes,” he said.

For a prolific cherry tomato plant, Smith recommends the Sweet 100 variety.

“You won’t be able to count all of the tomatoes that one plant will produce,” he said.

Despite his credentials as a certified fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society of England, where he studied biology, history, and design, Smith makes gardening very approachable. He remembers family dinners and dinner-time discussions that centered around what came out of the garden each day and how it was grown.

“There are so many memories from the garden,” he said. “It’s exciting to see that another generation of gardeners will grow up with these experiences.”