Successful gardening is not as simple as finding some open dirt and throwing some seeds down, but growing food in a backyard is something more people have tried to take up amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lincoln University assistant professor and state extension specialist Eleazar Gonzalez said that produced the idea in March for LU's Cooperative Extension and Research program to connect with people at home to teach them how to successfully grow their own food.
"A lot of people like to start gardening," Gonzalez said, but they get frustrated when they don't see the desired results.
"It's not easy to grow food," he said. For gardening to bear fruit, several factors have to be controlled, including good soil and watering too much or not enough.
"The training helps them to be more successful," Gonzalez said.
He said 98 people ultimately registered for a free program of nine online webinars teaching natural gardening that involves composting for organic soil and seeds that allow the same crops to be grown season after season.
The webinars each lasted 45 minutes, on evenings in late May through mid-July.
Gonzalez said people from throughout Central Missouri registered, but there were also international participants from Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana.
For people in closer proximity to Lincoln and who wanted to get their hands dirty, there was also the option of planting a garden to complement the online sessions. Gonzalez said three gardens were planted in Jefferson City and three more in Columbia.
He said the focus was on popular basic crops such as tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, onions and carrots, but people can grow what they want.
The goal was to provide people with the knowledge of how to have a secure supply of healthy food, amid supply chain issues in markets because of the pandemic. One of the online sessions was about food preservation - how to can, freeze and conserve harvested food.
He said an average of 22 people attended each online session, and at least 10 completed all of them. He considered that a successful number.
Gonzalez said the program will start again next March, and it will include topics on how to prepare a gardening bed and where to best locate it.
The program involves six other staff, and Gonzalez said he's working on a proposal to connect the small gardeners in the program with farmers markets - maybe to help make a collective of three or five gardeners in the same neighborhood who want to take their crops to market.
He's also looking for grants to further expand the program, including to provide soil to people so they don't have to worry as much about how to start their garden.
All of the "Gardenpreneurship" online sessions are available on YouTube, through the LUCER Media Center, at youtube.com/user/LUCERMediaCtr/playlists. Gonzalez said a gardening manual he wrote will also be offered to the public.
A registration link for the webinars was available at bit.ly/3bO9CXo, and Gonzalez said that link would be updated when the program starts again.
More information about LU's Cooperative Extension is available at lincolnu.edu/web/cooperative-extension.