Apparently gardening sales are up this year. And some stores are struggling to keep up with the surge in demand. Given my experiences this past weekend, I'm not surprised to see this.
I tried to grow sweetpeas last year, but I got my seeds in way too late to get results. [For the uninitiated, sweet peas are a pea vine that is grown for it's plentiful, delightful, cuttable flowers.]
This year I decided to make an early start with the seeds. You know how some small projects expand and before long they are big projects? Well, I came home with multiple kinds of seeds, Jiffy 7 peat pots, and special propagation trays. Pretty soon my window-sills were covered with sprouting things.
The packet instructions were clear -- start this process 6 weeks before the last frost. But things seem to have advanced really fast, and soon I had a bunch of 4 inch plants in tiny peat pellets flopping out of their seed trays.
Back to the garden centre I go to try to find some inexpensive 3 inch pots. I was really surprised that both Home Depot and Canadian Tire, with their large-ish garden centres, didn't have a product that met my needs. I found myself considering the purchase of about 50 small terra cotta pots at 75 cents each. This seemed like ridiculous overkill.
I wondered what my grandparents would have done -- surely something clever and thrifty. A brainstorm hit -- which you see in the picture below.
Back to consumers, I can draw a couple of lessons from all this.
[1] Gardening is a very popular hobby. Something like 1/3 of American households had a garden last year, and more plan to start this year. According to the story in MarketingDaily, the number of households with gardening intentions is up 19% from last year.
It's popular for a number of reasons. It's relaxing. It's social and community centred. You can get really great produce for low cost, knowing exactly what fertilizers and pesticides were used. It gives you an excuse to muck around outside when the weather is nice. You experience the joy of creation. All of these benefits and more enter into it.
[2] The recession is a motivating factor for people. Those who already garden are thinking about expanding their efforts this year. And new people are thinking of trying it out. It's not like they are going to be away in Europe for two weeks this year, right? So maybe grow tomatoes instead.
[3] There are many substitutes for any product. They might not even be in your category. My coffee-cup substitute cost a whopping $1.99 for a bag of 51 cups.
[4] Emotional benefits can come from many places. Not only did I save money, I didn't have to keep driving around in hope of finding something to meet my needs. And I came home feeling too clever by half. Bargain-hunting is a highly emotionally rewarding activity.
Resources
Sales Down? Not in the Gardening Aisle, by Sarah Mahoney, Marketing Daily, March 30, 2009.
