It’s just another day on Charlotte Anthony’s gardening crusade. She drives her pickup truck full of soil, tools, and other gardening supplies to yet another home to help start a garden from scratch. 

Once there, she’ll transform a patch of dry soil covered in long matted grass in an overgrown backyard into a vegetable garden. 

After getting some help unloading the supplies from her truck, Anthony starts directing the creation of the garden. She doesn’t have an exact plan in her head of what the finished garden will look like when she starts digging. “It’s an organic plan,” she said. “The garden tells me.”

 Garden plots at community gardens in Eugene, like these boxed plots at the Amazon Community Garden, cost $60 a year. This only includes the use of the plot and some shared tools in the garden's shed; other costs for gardeners include seeds, specialized tools, and fertlizer. CLICK PHOTO FOR MULTIMEDIA CONTENT

With Anthony’s help, along with the hard work of her client and her friends, the grass from the patch of ground that will become the garden is quickly removed. A growing swath of earth the color of dark chocolate emerges. As they work, the smell of wet grass combines with the musky smell of freshly dug soil. 

By the end of the day, what was once a patch of thick grass is now three raised rows that curve into each other, the shape of giant bananas. Floppy-leafed vegetable seedlings, full of promise, poke out from the freshly laid rich, black coffee-colored soil.  Eugene has gained another vegetable garden.  

Anthony runs Victory Gardens for All, an organization that helps inexperienced gardeners start and maintain new vegetable gardens with the ultimate goal of increasing the volume of gardens in the Eugene-Springfield area. Her services have been in high demand lately and the current recession is one of the reasons.

Many are realizing that by having a vegetable garden, they stand to gain more besides the health benefits, the decreased environmental impact, and the better taste of garden-fresh produce. They could also be saving money by eliminating a trip to the grocery store. And in the current cash-strapped times, in which 

the recession has rejuvenated a whole slew of ways to save money, growing your own food is looking pretty attractive.

Sarah Kingerly works in her plot at the Amazon Community Gardens. She gardens mainly because she loves to grow her own food and has never really considered it to be a financial decision.

Food gardening in the United States is on the rise this year, according to the results of a new survey done by the National Gardening Association, a non-profit organization focused on plant-based education. This year, the survey found 7 million more households plan to grow their own fruits, vegetables, herbs or berries than last year, a 19 percent increase. “More Americans are recognizing the benefits of growing their own produce, including improved quality, taste, and cost savings,” the NGA said in a summary of the survey findings.

This nation-wide trend is no different in the Eugene-Springfield area. Anthony believes money has definitely been a factor in people’s decisions to start gardens recently.  

A helping hand

Starting a vegetable garden isn’t exactly an easy project, which is why many have turned to Anthony. Growing your own food takes time, Anthony said, and that’s one of the reasons people get discouraged. That is part of why she wants to help people start gardens, so she can make sure they are successful.

She started Victory Gardens for All a little less than two years ago after she ran into 10 people in one week who told her every year they have the intention of starting a garden, learn about it in a book, and become overwhelmed. Anthony, who thinks there’s no way you can learn about gardening from a book, knew what to do. “I said, ‘Let’s just do it.’” And so the gardening crusade began.

For Anthony, gardening is almost instinctual. It’s in her blood, she said. Her grandfather was from Denmark and he grew all the food for his family and his father, a peasant who also lived off the land. Her earliest gardening experience was pulling weeds for her father, which wasn’t very fun, but eventually she came to discover the joys of gardening. 

“If I don’t have gardening I go crazy,” she said. “I get all wrapped up in what this person thinks of me or what’s going wrong with the world … Once I’m in the garden I’m fine.”

Victory Gardens was also a great way to address her concerns about global warming through helping reduce the distance food is required to travel to peoples’ dinner tables. Several months after getting started, she officially named her efforts Victory Gardens for All, inspired by the vegetable “victory gardens” planted by nearly 20 million Americans during World War II after labor and transportation shortages made it difficult to harvest fruits and vegetables and ship them to stores. In these new victory gardens she’s planting, she said the “victory” stands for victory over global warming.

An investment that pays back

For her services she asks for a $50 donation, a deal compared to the cost of starting a garden without her help, which she said would cost at least $100.

Starting a garden does take a significant investment. There are all the tools required, the seeds, the seedlings or starts (which are more expensive if they’re organic), trellises for beans and tomatoes, and various measures to keep pests large and small out of the garden.

Leslie Rellee (foreground) and her friend Maria have been gardening together for a few years now. The two of them, plus fellow gardener Frederic Gauble, have recently expanded to two plots at the Skinner City Farm.

This investment is worth it, according to the results of the National Gardening Association’s recent survey, which found those who grow their own food do actually save money. According to the survey, the average 600-square-foot garden can produce 300 pounds of fresh produce, worth $600 (at $2 a pound). Therefore, the survey indicates, the average gardener gains $530 after subtracting the average initial investment on the garden of $70.

With the $50 donation, Anthony will provide good soil, fertilizer, vegetable starts, and seeds. She grows all the starts that she brings to people’s homes in a big white, plastic greenhouse, which is part Victory Gardens for All headquarters. 

She also received a grant from the Willamette Food and Farm Coalition, which promotes the purchase of locally grown food, specifically for helping low-income people and those who have recently lost their jobs to start gardens. This allows her to provide her services for free to those who need them. 

She asks those who use her services to help with at least three other gardens in exchange for theirs. Victory Gardens For All wouldn’t succeed without people working together and helping each other out. When Anthony goes out to help start a new garden, she’s usually joined by past or future garden recipients and the current client’s friends and family gathered together to help. With this help, the garden can be finished quickly. “Humans require humans,” she said.

Being able to garden is something everyone should be able to do, Anthony said. She thinks of the skills needed to garden as survival skills. “I feel really strongly that we all need these skills,” she said. “We’re like ducks out of water when we don’t have these skills.”

Benefits of garden resources

Victory Gardens isn’t the only resource for those hoping to gain gardening skills and start a new garden. The Eugene Community Gardens Program, which operates six community gardens located throughout the city, offers plots perfect for those who don’t have the space to start a garden at their home.

The way gardening makes Frederic Gauble feel is one of the things he loves about it. “It’s therapeutic as hell,” he said. Simply working in his garden plot, he said, is better than the counseling he’s done in the past. “It’s positive time spent,” he said.

This year he’ll probably be spending even more positive time in his garden now that he’s doubled his garden space. 

Like other gardeners with plots at Eugene community gardens, for Gauble the recession has certainly been on his mind and affected how he’s gardening this year. Gauble, who’s had a plot at Skinner City Farm community garden plot for five years, decided to get a second plot this year and said he’s definitely growing more because of the recession.

He believes that having a community garden plot where he grows his own food has definitely saved him money. “It’s always paid for itself — more than paid for itself,” he said. 

Gauble likes to eat fresh, organic produce and growing it himself means he can actually enjoy it. “It’s great to have organic food that I can’t afford in the grocery store,” he said. This means an organic vegetable garden may be the perfect solution for those hurting financially during the recession, but who don’t want to give up their commitments to a healthier lifestyle that includes pricey organic produce. Plus, by growing his organic food himself, Gauble said he knows that it definitely is organic, whereas in the grocery store there’s no way of knowing for sure.  

The savings a gardener of a community garden plot might receive are most apparent when comparing the cost of buying organic produce in the grocery store to the cost of growing it, especially because gardeners in the community gardens are only allowed to use organic techniques. 

When Phyllis Hockley, a community garden plot owner for 19 years, sees how expensive the organic produce is in the grocery store, she realizes just how much she’s saving by gardening. “It’s a
big savings, and it’s good to eat something totally fresh,” she said. “I hardly have to go to the store in
the summer.” 

Gardens are brimming with fresh starts as the spring planting season hits full swing. One of the most popular plants to grow is tomatoes, because they are cheap to grow at home but expensive to buy in stores.

Others aren’t so convinced of whether having a community garden plot will save you money. “I don’t think that we save any money,” said John Eagen, who has a plot at the Amazon Community Gardens with his wife and crunched the numbers to see if they were saving. “The reality is that when you walk around the (community) garden you find that people spend a fair amount of money on their gardens.”

The cost of a community garden plot at any of the six Eugene community gardens is $60 a year. In addition to the use of a plot, gardeners also have access to water and the tools in the garden tool shed. The true cost, as Eagen said, comes when gardeners start buying everything that ends up in the plot, plus any additional tools or supplies required that aren’t available in the garden tool shed. 

Then there’s the time commitment. The brochure for the Eugene community gardens tells prospective gardeners to plan to spend at least four hours a week maintaining their plot during the gardening season.  

Community plot demand increasing

Whether it will save money or not, it’s become increasingly difficult to get a plot in a Eugene community garden. “Demand is outstripping supply,” said Paul Gordon, the director of Eugene’s community garden program, of the amount of interest they received this year from people hoping to get a plot at one of the city’s six community gardens. Plots are assigned using a lottery system, he said, and this year 130 people were competing for only 50 available plots, leaving a waiting list of 80 people. Gordon said it’s unlikely everyone will end up getting a plot.

This increased popularity is caused by a variety of things, he said, the economy being one of them. “People are thinking that it’s more affordable to put food on their table if they grow it,” he said.

Gardening gives those affected by the recession the ability to provide for themselves, Gordon said. “Gardening also contributes to a sense of well-being,” he said. “When times get tough people want to do things that make them feel better.”

Food for Lane County’s community garden plots also have a waiting list, said Jen Anonia, the organization’s garden program director. The garden program has received a huge surge of interest in general, she said. They’ve been asked by several organizations to give talks about community and neighborhood gardening and to be consultants for gardening projects. More people have also been coming by to get advice and information about how to grow their own food successfully, she said. 

Many Eugene community gardeners agree that despite the recession, in the long run, reaping the other benefits of growing your own food is much more important to them than any money they save. 

“You probably do save a lot of money, but you probably don’t even notice,” community gardener Julie Berndt said.

Others share her sentiment that money is not their top priority when it comes to gardening. “I don’t garden to save money, although I suspect that I do. I garden because I like it,” fellow community gardener Greg Armstead said. “What I get out of this garden tastes better than anything that I’d get out of the grocery store.”

Just like Armstead, many other Eugene community gardeners emphasize they garden simply because they enjoy it, not for any financial gain. 

The true savings a garden gives you aren’t tangible, seasoned community gardener Phyllis Hockley said. “It’s a savings just to be out here in the sunshine.” 

“My own boss”

Being out in the sunshine is a perk Sinclair Morgan didn’t expect to find in his garden at home. Just being outside is his favorite thing about having his new garden that Victory Gardens helped him start on the quarter acre of land he owns behind his home in Springfield. “It’s like therapy, in a sense. It gets your mind off the world,” he said. “Something about putting your hands in the dirt.” 

One day, when he was surfing the Internet, a Register-Guard article about Anthony and her Victory Garden efforts caught his eye. At 57, Morgan knew he was going to retire soon and finding himself unemployed after being laid off from work last December meant he had an opportunity to jump start his retirement plans. “It forced me to think of something to do,” he said.

His retirement plan was to build a greenhouse, grow food in his backyard, and live off the land selling his produce. “I was thinking of something to keep me busy,” he said. “It was just that I wanted to be outside.”

Morgan’s still-young garden isn’t much yet, but he’s been making progress on filling the quarter acre, working by himself six to seven hours a day. His family helps him on the weekends. Most of the half acre of land that Morgan’s garden sits on is still covered with tall, wild grass growing on wavy ground, dotted with tree trunks. The garden beds peek out in front of the wild land behind them, some elegantly lined with round stones Morgan collected out of the ground, which seems to
be full of them.  

The most impressive feature of his garden is the round greenhouse Morgan built with help from Anthony out of a white plastic sheet draped over curved rebar.

The cost of building the greenhouse, Morgan said, was only $150, and the only thing he paid for was the rebar. He was able to get the rest of the materials for free with Anthony’s help. She told him about BRING Recycling, a non-profit recycler in Eugene, where he was able to get some of the materials he needed for the greenhouse and the help to get the plastic covering for free.

Racheal Poplack, who has a plot at Skinner City Farm, says that the recession has figured into her planting this year, as far as how much she is growing. The more plants she grows, the less she will have to go to the store over the summer.

Through this experience, Morgan has found that by connecting with the community around him, he’s been able to get quite a few materials he needs for his garden for free. His wheelbarrow, for example, was donated to him. He’s also learned that he can get free compost from city parks made from plant waste, such as leaves. “It’s amazing if you just ask around what you can get,” he said. And by volunteering at the Springfield Farmer’s Market, more experienced growers are helping show him the ropes of selling your produce, which will come in handy when his garden starts yielding a crop.  

While Morgan is looking for a full-time job, he enjoys the work he does for himself now in his garden. “The commute is a few steps,” he said. “I’m my own boss in a sense, get to set my own hours.”   

Right now Morgan can’t say if he’s going to be making money from his garden. After all, he said, there’s a lot left for him to learn. He’ll just have to wait and see how his first harvest turns out.