ABSTRACT
The home food garden represents a major lacuna in the rapidly expanding academic literature on urban agriculture in the developed world. A recent review of the peer-reviewed literature on community gardens, for example, identified 46 studies of such gardens in the United States1. A comparable search on Google Scholar for studies of US home food gardens yielded only five results, including: two quantitative analyses of the spatial distribution of urban food gardens, including home gardens, in Chicago, Illinois2 and Madison, Wisconsin3; a socio-demographic analysis of survey data from rural, suburban and urban households with food gardens in the state of Ohio4; a qualitative study of Vietnamese home gardeners in Louisiana5; and a study of households participating in a home gardening program in San Jose, CA6. What do we know about home food gardens
suggests they make a substantially larger contribution to the total area of urban food production than the public sites of urban agriculture, e.g., community gardens, farms and school gardens, that have garnered more attention2,3. Taylor and Lovell2, for example, found that the total area of larger home gardens in Chicago visible in aerial images in Google Earth exceeded that of all other urban agriculture sites combined (158,876 versus 105,305 m2). With the addition of smaller gardens not visible in aerial images, this number can be expected to be much higher.
