Recession Briefing 9.16: Gardening Won’t Solve Everything

What you need to know today to survive and thrive in the recession.

“The idea that gardening is going to solve household budget woes plus the obesity epidemic, to boot, is a bunch of fertilizer,” writes Martha White. (The Big Money)

The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, said Tuesday that it was “very likely” that the recession had ended although he cautioned that it could be months before unemployment rates dropped significantly. (New York Times)

The downturn in high-end fashion is hitting celebrity-backed brands hard. Many are disappearing. (Wall Street Journal)…

No New Plants, Period.

Gardening, after storms and the economic downturn, is akin to living with the dogged devotion of a Mets or Red Sox fan. As I wander through the garden and see the places crushed by the ice storm or rotted by the ceaseless rain I say to myself, “Wait until next year.” I say this too as I leaf through garden catalogs and dog-ear the pages. I know I can’t buy anything because I am on a recession diet: NO NEW PLANTS, PERIOD.

The economic downturn hit our house hard when I lost my part time editing job and our health insurance in March 2008. Then the stock market debacle turned our savings into dust. My response was denial; I just refused to open my account statements. It is possible to practice denial in dealing with retirement or college tuitions accounts, but I had to walk out my front door and no amount of denial would allow me to over look the havoc wreaked on my garden.

The first thing I had to do was clean up the disaster. Then, since I am known to be a positive, plucky person, I decided to make gardening in a time of recession into a game, a challenge. How to garden when there is no money for plants or accoutrements? Not a penny. Luckily plants divide, unlike stocks of late, and what the economic community call “the green shoots of growth” seem to abound in the garden. I just had to learn to notice…

Group-Gardening is All the Rage

If you pick up one new activity this year, we are betting it will be gardening (if you aren’t doing it already). Thanks to a confluence of DIY fads, a need to grow-your-own, and the White House’s own initiative in this area, gardening seems to be taking on an elevated status in the Recession.

Over the weekend, WiseBread dug into (excuse the pun) the White House way of gardening in a group, noting, “That sort of combined effort can be exactly what it takes to create a gardening success.” The key is communication and good planning about what you actually want to grow (in case none of you likes eggplant despite your abundance of seeds) and fairly divvying up the work and expenses…

Redux: Digging the Downturn

Looking back to the Great Depression to see the path ahead.

Can we garden our troubles away?

During the Great Depression, people turned back to the land, growing vegetables in small suburban yards and vacant city lots. These subsistence patches were dubbed “depression gardens” and helped feed the nation during hungry times. People ate what they picked from their gardens, bartered their produce at stores for luxury goods like coffee, and traded regularly with neighbors. Folks reminiscing about those difficult times recall how much food could be coaxed from a few hundred yards…