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RE: [GWL]: Gardening Stats



Doreen Howard asked

1.  How many people are vegetable gardeners?
2.  How many people grow fruit?
3.  How much money is spent annually on vegetable and fruit gardening?
4.  How many people are interested in vegetable gardening?
5.  How many people are interested in unusual and/or odd plants?

Here is how I get to my numbers. Bruce Butterfield generally agrees with the
approach and the numbers generally jibe with his plus or minus 15%.  There
are about 65 million homes in this country with some property of some kind.
That is the base for any potential vegetable gardeners.
I then take the question - how many gardeners, of any kind, are there in the
country and think about how many gardens I see when I travel through a
neighborhood.  If there was one garden for every ten houses, then there
would be about 6.5 million gardeners in the country.  While the ratio of
gardens to no gardens varies from neighborhood to neighborhood, suburbs to
city, and suburbs to country, I use the suburbs and exurbs as my main model.
I have been doing this for fifteen years as a jogger running in
neighborhoods, just idly counting gardens as I jog or as I drive around an
area.
In my experience mostly in the East and the Mid West, I see one or two homes
of every ten with what I consider having a garden of some kind.  That puts
the number of gardeners at about 10 to 12 million.
If I am looking for vegetable gardens, the number drops to maybe one or two
per twenty homes or something under 3 million.
Fruit trees and berries will likely come under 1 million.
I've looked at these numbers against garden magazine subscription numbers,
numbers of gardening books sold each year, numbers of lawn mowers sold,
numbers of customers for seed companies like Burpee or Ferry Morse. My
approach generally stands up to those data.  While precision is probably
impossible, I am comfortable guessing that there are about 2 million very
serious vegetable gardeners in this country and another 2 or 3 million
dabblers with their tomato plants, pepper plants, and some lettuce.
Vegetable gardeners are notoriously cheap.  They will do anything to save a
buck.  So if there are about 2 million serious veggie growers, and they
spend maybe $50 and $100 a year on seeds, fertilizer, replacement tools, and
soaker hose, you still have a nice piece of change for the total $100 to
$200 million or so.  You do the guessing at the total and do the math.  I
don't think it is much more than $200 million, but that ain't bad.
In the past, when there has been an economic downturn in the country,
vegetable gardening has been one area where sales went up considerably.  So
I expect next year to see a good jump in vegetable seeds.  Of course the
USPS will kill them all with their machines, but hey, if you have
technology, you gotta use it. Right?

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