‘Grow your own’ backyard garden rush to beat the coronavirus panic

Australians fearful of coronavirus food shortages are increasingly resorting to home vegie gardens.

Duncan Cocking, partner Caryn Wright and their children. Picture: David Geraghty

Australians fearful of coronavirus food shortages are increasingly resorting to home veggie gardens, sparking a run on seedlings for tomatoes and all manner of leafy greens.

Spurred on by shortages at Coles and Woolworths, consumers are turning to the garden bed for produce and choosing shovels over shopping bags.

Victorian edible garden specialist Duncan Cocking, whose business runs out of the east Melbourne suburb of Burwood, said he had received a flurry of queries in recent days over the best veget­ables to grow to ensure food security. “Certainly in terms of seedlings and seeds, if you go into any nursery any moment the shelves are getting as bare as the ones in the supermarket,’’ he said.

In response, he recently released the The Leaf, Root & Fruit guide to COVID-19 Panic Induced Edible Gardening, which as of Wednesday night had been shared more than 600 times since he posted the link on Facebook the day before. “Lots of people contacting me want to know what could grow stocks quickly [but] it's a challenging time of year,” he said.

“This [coronavirus] crisis and the lack of products on supermarket shelves, people are trying to increase food security.”

Mr Cocking said the best things to plant at the moment were leafy greens and radishes, which would grow quickly, as well as vegetables that would survive the onset of winter such as beetroot, broccolis, cauliflower, turnip and broad beans.

Bunnings chief executive Michael Schneider said he had noticed increased demand for seedlings, especially vegetables, as well as other gardening products in the past few weeks, but he believed the increasing number of people working from home as well as public events being cancelled meant there was a lot of extra time for budding gardeners to try their hand at autumn plantings.

“I think also it is about the fact we have some people spending more time at home at the moment that they would otherwise spend,” he said. “So you had the Grand Prix cancelled in Melbourne the other day, and all of a sudden those people have a few extra days on their hand that they didn’t expect to have and so they decide to head down to a Bunnings.”