Business Blog

By Leah Walker — Maybe we should call her a baby bloomer. It didn’t take long for Michelle Obama to break sod for a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. The First Lady said she wanted to be able to offer fresh food to her family, friends and visitors, and to promote a healthy lifestyle. The undertaking, in the midst of the Great Recession, is a reminder of Eleanor Roosevelt and her Victory Garden in World War II. But could it also be what happens when a baby boomer with time on her hands, gains access to an expanse of fertile land — and National Park Service employees to maintain it?

According to the National Gardening association, this year, about 43 million U.S. households plan to grow their own fruits, vegetables, berries, and herbs – up nearly 20 per cent from last year. Saving money on bills was the number two reason they gave for the increased interest in gardening. Better tasting food was number one.

Those household plans are taking root. George Ball, head of privately held seed retailer and wholesaler Burpee, tells Reuters vegetable seed and transplant sales were up about 30 percent in March of this year, compared with March 2008.

Of the White House gardening effort, Linda Nazareth, author of The Leisure Economy, tells me, “I think it illustrates a nice mix of trends that the boomers are concerned about right now — nutrition (i.e. they are not going to live forever), thrift (a new one for them) and the need to have a ‘life’ — do something that isn’t about work.”

For those of us who grew up with more experience with canned peas than peas on a vine, gardening can be an exotic adventure. In her book, Nazareth predicts that the time-crunch society we live in now will develop into a leisure economy, as boomers turn their attention to arts and crafts, cooking, and yes, gardening. The activity at the White House may be demonstrating that the shift is underway.

Lucky Michelle Obama with a garden that warms up in early March. Here, the plans have been underway for weeks but the planting is just beginning. My potatoes last year were, frankly, an unexpected success — and the best part was when my family and I feasted on them on the back deck, not ten feet away from where they had grown.