Burpee’s Harvest Festival celebrates home gardening

You can blame it on the recession, if you choose, or to heightened concerns about the way our food is processed. Anyone who has seen Robert Kenner’s devastating documentary “Food, Inc.” (Magnolia Pictures, 2007) will never look at corn (not to mention beef, poultry and pork) products the same way again.

You can also credit the First Family’s White House vegetable garden, if you will, or (on a lighter note, during the 40th anniversary of Woodstock) to the desire of many to “get [themselves] back to the garden.” But this year has seen the biggest renaissance in edible gardening since the end of World War II.

To celebrate the boom in home vegetable gardening and to educate those eager to learn what to do after they harvest their garden bounty, world-class seed company W. Atlee Burpee & Co. is hosting its periodic Harvest Festival, Friday, Aug. 21, and Saturday, Aug. 22, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., rain or shine.

The two-day event will take place at Burpee’s Fordhook Farm at 105 New Britain Road, just across from Delaware Valley College in Doylestown.

The farm’s chief researcher, Grace Romero, during a tour of the vegetable gardens last Saturday, said, “The festival is all about the vegetables, including a workshop on preparing your garden, a tomato tasting and a peek at some of the new varieties we’re working on before they appear in the [Burpee] catalogue.”

Our tour of the Cook’s Garden (gourmet vegetables) revealed to this denizen of urban/suburban environments that Burpee’s, a company founded by the visionary 18-year-old W. Atlee Burpee in 1876, developed not only the Big Boy tomato but also Iceberg lettuce and that, “among the thousands of plants being tested,” according to Romero, “we might choose only 20 varieties.”

A tour of the Harvest Garden brought into sharp relief more than 500 tomatoes of every size, shape and color, including the Golden Mama, the only variety that retains its golden color in sauces, as well as a host of other vegetables, such as squash, peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, okra and tomatillo, all being tested for the catalogue.

At this moment, Burpee is harvesting a new variety of potato expected to have a rich, buttery texture, right on the heels of having developed (earlier this year) the Sweet Seedless tomato and the Salsa tomato, both available only through the catalogue.

Grace Romero — who got her first taste of gardening at her maternal grandmother’s farm in her native Philippines and who has degrees in horticulture and botany from Cornell University and the University of Michigan — said that the criteria for introducing new varieties of vegetables being developed at the Cook’s Garden (set up like a prospective domestic garden) and Heronswood (“unusually great plants,” according to its catalogue) are “that they offer something different, something not on the market yet — like superior taste, nutrition, yield and resistance to disease.”

Visitors will be able to roam across much of the farm’s 60 acres, during guided garden tours that will provide an advance look at some of Burpee’s new varieties prior to their release to the public. They can also attend a pesto-making demonstration given by cookbook author Laura Schenone, who will use freshly harvested basil grown in Fordhook’s kitchen garden.

Schenone will also give a lecture on “Discovering the Power of the Vegetable Garden — in the Kitchen, in History and in Daily Life,” followed by a book signing featuring two of her cookbooks.

Other planned activities include a tomato-tasting, in which visitors will have a chance to taste and comment upon various Burpee’s tomatoes, purchase hard-good items as well as cool-weather vegetable seedlings, share and receive recipes from Burpee’s employees at a display table, and learn how to prepare their fall gardens and sow cool-weather vegetable seeds at a workshop led by Burpee’s expert horticulturalists. Food will also be available for purchase for those who get hungry during their visit.

There will also be a coloring contest for children.

So really, now, how does one explain the increased interest in vegetable gardening over the past few years? More than a mere fad, it has become a way of life for many.

As Burpee’s President George Ball Jr., a passionate gardener himself, explained in a telephone interview Aug. 7, “It all started with the aging of the baby boomers, that segment of the population that’s now middle-aged. There’s an ocean current of demographics flooding the marketplace.

“They include non-recurring events,” he said, “like concern for food safety. There have been a lot of food contamination problems and outbreaks, like salmonella, E. coli, fungal spores on raspberries grown in Central America, and the diseases keep mutating.”

Ball also cited health on a general level, with the rising awareness that eating home-grown vegetables in simply better for you — “plus, you’re exercising while doing it,” he added, “and it’s an environmental issue, gardening in healthy fresh air.”

Money is another factor. It’s not just that with more time spent at home, there is more cash available for other needs. The savings can be significant. In fact, a Burpee’s cost-analysis study uncovered the following — namely, “a 1 to 25 cost-savings ratio for those who grow their own vegetables as opposed to purchasing them at the supermarket. Simply put, folks who invest $50 in their vegetable garden on seeds and fertilizer will be able to harvest at least $1,250 worth of vegetables.”

“And with 401(k)s being cut,” continued Ball, “a lot of older people would rather send their granddaughter to college with the money they’re saving.”

According to the National Gardening Association (NGA), 19 percent more households will grow their own fruit, berries, vegetables and herbs this year than in 2008. The NGA also predicts a 20 percent increase in edible gardening in 2009 — that’s roughly 7 million new gardeners.

Ball explains, however, that even though many young people are becoming vegetarians and vegans, new gardeners are a small minority in this number. The huge increase, he contends, lies “in existing gardeners gardening more. And we find this expressed in two ways: 1. the increased size of gardens, and 2. flower sales have gone down, except for zinnias and sunflowers and others that grow alongside vegetables. But sales of seeds for roses and other more decorative flowers are way down.”

Ball does credit the Obama White House for much of the surging interest in edible gardening since the early part of the year.

He said, as casually as can be, “Michelle Obama called me on the first day of spring, seeking advice on the best seeds to plant at that time. Since it was kind of late in the planting season, I made some suggestions, and I hear that the garden is doing quite well. Next year will be even better.

“But what really impresses me is that the First Lady is not being a leader so much as she is responding to what the people want.”

If you want to know what the fuss is all about regarding planting your own edible garden, you couldn’t receive a much better primer than Burpee’s Garden Festival this weekend.