A new way of vegetable gardening, with someone else’s hands in the dirt

Jessica Dommes’ backyard looked like a life-size advertisement for the joy of gardening on a recent April morning. A yellow forsythia bush bloomed under a cloudless blue sky; the sun shone in that newly spring way that makes you want to go outside and stay there.

Dommes, 33, was preparing for the season — but not by cobbling together a raised bed or buying cucumber seeds at the hardware store. Instead, Dommes had scheduled a consultation with Backyard Eats, a young Philly company that helps people build, plant, maintain, and even harvest home vegetable gardens.

“At my last place, I painstakingly dug up the grass and put in beds myself,” said Dommes, a computer programmer and novice pandemic gardener. “And I do not want to repeat that experience at all.”

Your grandfather’s kitchen garden this is not. The wooden raised beds are absolutely level. Thin black irrigation tubes run through dirt rows like at a tiny industrial farm. QR codes for each seedling detail when and how to harvest. For an added fee, customers can sign up for experts to pluck the finished product, which more than half opt to do.

It is perhaps especially appealing to perfectionists, foodies, people who are nostalgic about the gardens their grandparents grew, and those with money but no time.

The cost can be steep: An average garden project, including two 4-by-8-foot beds, starts at $5,000 for a one-time installation fee, plus roughly $1,000-$2,000 for planting and full-service maintenance from March through November. (Customers can also add or subtract services a la carte).

Most community gardens focus on public spaces and most landscaping companies don’t specialize in “edibles,” as vegetables are called in the gardening world. That’s where Backyard Eats comes in.

“People have that feeling of growing their own food. We’re providing the feeling without all the potential frustrations,” said Mike Bennett, the company’s operations manager, who visited Dommes’ yard for the consultation. “To the extent they have time to devote to it, they can just go out there with their child to a perfectly clean garden where everything’s successful and just have fun.”

In the years since Backyard Eats was founded in 2016, pandemic lockdowns, supply chain instability, the rise of remote work, and surging inflation have transformed home gardening into a bona fide national craze. More than 18 million new gardeners joined the horticultural ranks in 2021, including many more millennials and Gen Zers, according to the National Gardening Survey. Talk of victory gardens returned; community garden waiting lists ballooned.

Backyard Eats’ continued popularity reflects this trend. It also suggests that for some of the city’s fledgling gardeners, the desire “to garden” is not exclusively about putting one’s own hands in the dirt. This year, Backyard Eats will build about 80 raised beds and plant 115 backyard gardens in the Philly area, even as some local community gardens say they’ve seen interest fade as people return to their normal lives.

“The volunteers have definitely dipped off,” said Deneyia Barbour, director of mental health and wellness at the Philly Peace Park, which maintains raised beds at 22nd and Jefferson in North Philadelphia and 49th and Girard in West Philadelphia. (She said some pandemic novices have since started herb gardens on their patios or even moved to farms outside of the city).

The Philadelphia Orchard Project, which has planted 66 orchards in partnership with community groups across the city since 2007, said in contrast it continues to see more volunteer interest than opportunities available. The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, which distributes about 260,000 seedlings a year to more than 170 community gardens across the city, said gardening enthusiasm dipped but is once again rising, maybe because of inflation and the higher cost of staples. All three organizations are committed to making sure people across the city know how to grow and harvest their own food.

“It shouldn’t just be a luxury activity,” said Phil Forsyth, co-executive director of the Philadelphia Orchard Project.

On a recent Tuesday morning, while Bennett surveyed Dommes’ backyard, another group of Backyard Eats employees hammered and leveled raised beds on the Wyndmoor lawn of a longtime gardener, who will do all the planting herself. A few blocks away, Pat Boyle, the company’s longest-tenured employee, planted spicy greens and snap peas in a Chestnut Hill backyard.

Some clients, wanting to re-create memories of flourishing family gardens without the accompanying risk of overwatering, under-watering, fungus, pests, weeds, devastation, despair, and abject failure, call in Boyle. Over the years, Boyle, 39, has handled a range of emergency calls from clients: the specialized irrigation system broke; a plant that was alive yesterday is dead today. He also often does the harvesting.

“You want to pick a tomato just before it turns ripe,” he said. “There’s like 100 cherry tomatoes. Not everyone’s gonna want to just sit there for an hour.”

Jamie Fleck, 41, always loved gardening with his grandfather in Long Island, N.Y., when he was growing up. When he moved with his own family to Blue Bell in the winter of 2021, he wanted a thriving vegetable garden. It felt like a symbol of home — and a connection to his grandparents, who had just passed away.

But he also didn’t really know how to garden. So last spring he hired Backyard Eats to design and build four raised beds and a high fence to keep out animals, and to maintain the beds weekly, including harvesting the zucchinis, beets, raspberries, and tomatoes as they became ripe. In between, he brought his daughter out so they could pick together.

This year, he’ll be doing the same.

“I like to think that they’re helping me with my green thumb,” Fleck said. “It’s still a pale yellow, but it’s moving in the right direction.”