Jan. 29, 2009 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Every day, Hunter Reno selects lettuce, herbs, spinach or snow peas for lunch from one of her three-foot by five-foot raised gardens in South Miami. Dinner salads come from here, too, as do herbs for morning eggs for her husband and two daughters.

"I cook six nights a week at home, and I'm always using stuff from the garden," she says. Her girls, Ella, 6, and Chloe, 4, love to pick snacks from the organic garden like leaves of lemon sorrel and yard-long beans.

Cost-conscious South Floridians are going back to the land, growing their own squash, beans, lettuce and arugula in backyard gardens and in reclaimed plots.

And not just in suburbia, where farming long ago gave way in the face of relentless sprawl. Downtown condo balconies are sprouting micro-gardens.

In the heart of Overtown, three adjacent lots are brimming with collard greens. And in sophisticated South Beach, apartment dwellers are raising tomatoes, herbs, flowers and greens on a communal patch called Victory Garden. (Want in? There's a two-year wait list.)

SEED SALES UP

"It's a hurricane," said George Ball, owner of W. Atlee Burpee Co., one of the largest catalog seed companies in the country. "Sales of vegetables and herb seeds and plants are up 30 to 40 percent over 2007, double the annual growth of the last five years."

Last year, vegetable seeds outsold flowers for the first time in recent memory, and they will probably do so again this year. Ball cites several reasons: People are concerned about food safety and the environment; baby boomers are aging and have more free time; the economy has tanked.

But how economical is that home vegetable garden? Pretty economical, horticulturalists, educators and seed sellers say -- if you choose your crops wisely and know what you're doing.

Ball says the average cost-benefit ratio of home-grown vegetables is 1 to 25, based on a garden of 30 vegetables his company studied last year. That means every dollar spent on a garden produces $25 worth of vegetables.

However, with six of the most popular vegetables -- tomatoes, beans, peas, bell peppers, butter head lettuce and carrots -- the ratio is much better, he says.

A $10 investment in those seeds plus $80 to pay for soil, fertilizer and the cost of building the bed could yield $650 worth of vegetables -- a savings, theoretically, of $560, Ball says. Burpee is offering those six vegetables for $10 (ordinarily sold individually for a total of $20) in an online seed collection called "The Money Garden."

A TOMATO PAYS

Various vegetables pay better than others, he says. Corn is not "a great deal from a money standpoint," Ball said, but a tomato is. "A [store-bought] fresh vine-ripened beefsteak tomato is $1.50 to $2," he said.

Stephanie Turner, director of seed product at Park Seed in Greenwood, S.C., elaborated on the cost savings on a tomato from that company.

"If you grow a Cherokee Purple tomato, you can expect a yield of 12 pounds per plant," she said. "That packet would grow more than 300 pounds of tomatoes and a seed cost of $1.95. Comparatively, a good price for tomatoes at the store might be $2 per pound. So, $1.95 per packet could grow $600 worth of tomatoes."

There are ways to cut costs and make your produce less expensive, said Adrian Hunsberger, an urban horticulture agent with the Cooperative Extension Service, who teaches master gardening classes.

For example, you can make your own compost from kitchen peelings and coffee grounds as well as yard clippings, and grow vegetables in pure compost.

Crop selection, too, will help reduce costs by extending the production season. Cherry tomatoes will produce for nine months, Hunsberger says.

"I've harvested broccoli for a year, and one collard plant will feed a family."

As the economy has declined, the public's interest in vegetable gardening has shot up.

"I checked our Master Gardener telephone records and a rough guesstimate since Oct. 1 is that vegetable garden calls are up 300 percent," said John Pipoly, director of the Broward County Cooperative Extension Service in Davie. "They've tripled."

At Miami Dade College, where Andres Mejides has taught organic vegetable gardening for 30 years at the Environmental Center, his classes have been full. By contrast, a few years ago "we would occasionally not be able to have class because of lack of interest. For the last 1 1/2 years, there really is no problem filling them, he said.

Desiree Fields, a private chef in South Broward County, grows her own produce, fruit and macadamia nuts. During the last drought, Fields saved rain in barrels. (She has been upgrading that system, so she will have 600 gallons of water in the future.)

Fields also uses rinse water from the dishes for her plants, which now take up most of the yard. To economize, she says, save seeds, use vertical space and share with neighbors.

Some plants, such as arugula, will reseed themselves, she says. Others, such as lettuce, can have longer growing seasons if they are in shade. Fields has found that after about five months, she begins to realize savings after the initial expense of creating a garden.

Kim Arkell, who tends bar in South Beach, and her friend Angela Garrison, a Miami Lakes mother, have started an organic garden in a neighbor's vegetable plot.

"We wanted to do it because we're really tired of inferior produce and we wanted to start eating healthy and organic," Arkell said. "When we started telling friends, they all wanted gardens. So, we're thinking about starting a little business."

Community gardens are increasingly popular, judging from the phone calls to the American Community Gardening Association, says Vicki Garrett, projects coordinator for the nonprofit organization in Columbus, Ohio.

"I get people living in trendy areas of town, and I get people who don't even have a computer who want to learn how to do a community garden," Garrett said. "And I get people who want to do church gardens to donate to food banks and the homeless."

The 2-year-old Overtown Community Garden at Northwest Third Avenue and Ninth Street in Miami is funded with a $100,000 grant from the city's Southeast Overtown/Park West and Omni Community Redevelopment Agencies. Part of it grows on land once occupied by an apartment building and is now overseen by Roots in the City, a nonprofit program started by Marvin Dunn, historian and retired Florida International University professor. Volunteers and paid Overtown residents care for the garden, which takes up most of a city block, Dunn said.

"The first year, we planted a little of everything," Dunn said. "The most popular was collard greens. So, this year, it's all Georgia collard greens with decorative plants around the edge."

FIGURING THE COST

In the late 1970s, when growing veggies was last popular, the University of Florida studied a Homestead vegetable garden, calculating the cost of the garden and the retail value of the produce.

More than 800 pounds of produce with a retail value of $495.70 was harvested over the season from a 20-foot by 30-foot raised bed. The cost of materials -- concrete blocks, irrigation lines, pesticides and hardware -- was $339.65.

However, if depreciated over a five-year period, the garden's cost would be reduced to $95.60.

To help cut 2009 costs, Hunsberger, the horticulture agent, suggests going to Rinker Materials, "where you can get damaged blocks for next to nothing. Or use limestone rocks or recycled lumber. You can make it so that you're spending zero dollars, other than for the seed."

Newstex ID: KRTB-0123-31320817