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at chicagoreader.com, Mike Sula wrote:COVID-19 has struck Illinois in force just as the spring gardening season is starting. If you’re a gardener in Chicago, you’ve probably already ordered and started germinating your seeds, plotted your now-dormant backyard or balcony plot (or pots), and made a wish list of seedlings you’d like to buy from garden centers and the various community plant sales scheduled to begin in May (see below).

If you’re not a gardener, you might be thinking about becoming one. You can’t grow toilet paper, but you can grow your own food. If you aren’t thinking of gardening, you should, if only because it will give you something rewarding and productive to do.* Right now food insecurity is an (anxious) state of mind, so please don’t hoard. Growing your own food yields many good things besides the food. There’s nothing more meditative and peaceful than spending a summer watching your own basil plant sprout and flourish.

I have yet to hear from the city or state whether garden centers and community plant sales will be considered essential businesses and be allowed to sell the millions of seedlings now coming up in commercial greenhouses, but many passages in Governor Pritzker’s executive order indicate that they all are. But it’s all uncertain. I know one garden center that has closed. I know another that plans to stay open. The Chicago Park District has closed all its fieldhouses and playgrounds, but a representative tells me that May plant sales at Kilbourn and Garfield Park have not been cancelled.

During World War II a massive worldwide gardening campaign known as Victory Gardens provided food security for millions of people during disruptions to the supply chain. Chicago was a leader in that movement. And it could be again.

I talked with a pair of gardening experts about why home and community gardening is more important now than ever, and what they had to say is encouraging.