Vegetable Gardening Boom is Over
Three times in the last few weeks, I’ve seen discussions about vegetable gardening, questioning its popularity. The first time, several garden writers were enthusiastically extolling the virtues and high interest of vegetable gardening readers. My suggestion that the boom of vegetable gardening was probably over was, quite frankly, not enthusiastically received.
My reality is that I look at the statistics generated over eight websites and can compare and contrast data from year-to-year. I have enough traffic, enough articles read, to get a sense, an overall statistically accurate sense of what my beginner gardeners are most interested in at any given time. This is not to say these statistics are accurate outside of my websites, they only reflect one small part of the gardening population. They reflect those people who find my websites or return to my websites for their gardening information.
Other discussions were within the trade. In garden centers and nurseries, owners are gazing at the tea leaves trying to establish whether there would be an increased, decreased or stable market for vegetables next spring. The illustration below is from Google Trends, which measures the raw searches on Google’s network for this topic.
There are several things to note of importance. The first is the length of the curve between 2004 and 2007. The curve stretches out year-by-year, showing an increased interest month over month, and year over year. 2007 also marks the last year where there was virtually no interest in vegetable gardening in November, the flatlining shown in every year does not exist between 2008 2009 and 2010. This shows that the overall interest level is rising with no down time in searches or readership interested by this topic.
The second thing to note is the raw number of searches that steadily increases, peaking in 2009 with the number of searches in 2010 roughly equal those of 2008 but both are below the peak of 2009. Another trend to note is the depth of the valley between the peaks. The depth of the valley between 2009 and 2010 is slightly deeper than the depth of the valley between 2008 and 2009. The trend here, and it looks to be similar between 2010 and 2011 is a decreasing amount of interest during this non vegetable gardening season.
The problem with interest trends, is they may or may not correlate to to vegetable gardening sales at the nursery level. It is impossible to say whether some of the beginners will stay and become enthusiastic vegetable gardeners or whether they will simply abandon growing their own and adopt something equally positive such as the hundred–mile diet. Or, go back to their old ways.
The may also be regional differences in these can be tracked, to a lesser degree, within Google Trends. In my world however, the vegetable gardening information boom is clearly on the wane. And as the searches for information go, so too go the sales increases. If I still owned my nursery, I wouldn’t be increasing the number of vegetable packs very much unless I had sold out to the bare walls and even then, I’d be cautious.
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