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Comment by seesawtron | Hacker News Reader

Have people also started growing vegetables and herbs at home as their creative projects?

Unfortunately basics of agricultural farming are not part of school curriculum. I wonder if that was so at some point in the past. Wouldn't it be so great if everyone of us knew the basics of farming like we know basic maths? It could in theory result in growing more plants (good for environment), getting some fresh vegetables or fruits every now and then, a past time activity to enhance one's mental health by getting to work with your hands and creating something from bare minimum?

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I've heard that there are a lot more people planting gardens this year, yes. I'm not doing more than some beans and peppers due to previous experience with our desert summers, but if I was somewhere more temperate / water-rich, I'd definitely be doing it.

My high school had an FFA chapter that had a small garden behind the shop building; students with room at home would also raise sheep, cattle, and hogs. There weren't a lot of people in FFA, though. I think gardening, at the very least, would be a good addition to the curriculum... ideally I'd like to see all students taking at least one home economics / shop type course every year beginning in middle school, but if wishes were horses...

Its been trendy to start gardening since the beginning of covid, at least anecdotally (I've ramped up my container gardening) and from what I hear on podcasts. The 'Victory Garden' in particular is a trendy concept and I'm all for it.

My one concern about this as a food source is that if you don't have soil (in other words, you have to buy it and put in containers, then amend heavily) I suspect this is vastly more expensive and worse for the environment than buying from farms. The quality is fantastic though - tomatoes from the store make me gag, but fresh off the vine the ones I grow are delicious. It is also very good for mental health.

Sounds like a pretty good tradeoff to me.

I finally figured out how to keep a supermarket basil plant alive, how to promote new growth and slow down flowering.

And I've also succeeded at rooting and planting it - so now I have 5 supermarket basil plants!

It's really gratifying - but my windowsill definitely won't be enough to grow the amount of herbs I'd like to consume. Perhaps I'll have to take my new knowledge to the back yard.

Are you doing something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD9CIQ7ynOc

I heard about it recently and want to try it out next time I get a basil plant.

Yep, pretty much exactly that. The supermarket basil (I think it's Genovese Basil) feels a bit more delicate than the ones he shows there, the result being that maybe 1/3 of the cuttings just rotted away in the water. But 2/3 success felt pretty good!

After seeing the devastated shelves in the local supermarket shortly before lockdown, I semi-jokingly bought a load of vegetable seeds wondering whether I’d need to dig up the lawn and turn it into a kitchen garden. Three months later we’ve got a good crop of cucumber, tomatoes, peppers and carrots going.

You and a lot of others.

A seed distributor I have a distant connection with with was running at about 7x normal volumes. They were also selling a lot of things that won’t be grown easily at this time of year, so there are likely to be mixed results.

Very much so. There have been a lot of news articles, especially in the UK which I follow more carefully, about it.

I've been growing herbs, and flowers, on my balcony for years, but this year we managed to get an allotment - 10mx10m for €50/year, and only a few minutes walk from our house.

We spent a lot of time cutting down grass, weeding and similar, but we got very lucky with the timing. We gained access in mid-May before all the places were claimed, and we've managed to plant Onions, Garlic, Potatoes, and a bunch of pretty plants. Radish/Turnips/Carrots aren't doing so well, but everything else is thriving.

Things are growing well and every couple of days I head over to water, weed, and take care of the plot. I'm actually surprised by how much I've been enjoying the process.

We expanded our backyard garden. Getting things to plant has been an effort, since we didn't want to go into the garden stores. We found some seeds at the supermarket, which are turning out to not be very fertile. Our biggest challenge is dealing with the growing season in Wisconsin, which requires starting things indoors.

Next year we'll know to research things sooner, and we'll figure out where to find things like the right kinds of disease resistant varieties.

I have a garden but dealing with bugs and weeds limits my enthusiasm for planting crops outdoors and so in addition to just growing a few things outside I’ve also been growing things in our AeroGarden and am experimenting with Kratky style hydroponics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratky_method .

This can be helped (but not solved) by sticking to a few basic things that grow well in your climate. As soon as I try something that is borderline the amount of work requires goes way up.

good luck mate. looks interesting

The concept of educational community gardens and seed libraries occasionally comes up in conversation about the scope of services provided by traditional (book) libraries. As an example, there's an official program in Boulder already:

https://boulderlibrary.org/seed-to-table/

There are college degrees for that sort of thing.

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