Pushed inside by the coronavirus, some pick up shovels and wheelbarrows to stay busy
By Angela Roberts
A seventh and eighth-grade science teacher at Chartiers-Houston, Jennifer Penak is used to being on her feet all day, interacting with students and moving from classroom to classroom.
That hasn’t been the case since March, though, when Pennsylvania schools went online to tamp down on the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Since then, the South Strabane Township resident has been teaching from behind a computer screen – something that requires a whole lot of sitting.
So, to break up the day, she started heading outside during her lunch break. At first, it was just to pluck out a few weeds, but soon, she and her husband were sprucing up their flower beds and working on the walkway that leads to their pool.
For years, Penak said, with life consumed by their four children’s sports, they were happy they got the grass cut most weeks. But now their backyard is looking better than ever. The family even spent Mother’s Day spreading out a heaping truck-load of mulch.
“It just has been good for me to get outside, and it’s given me a reason to get up and moving again,” she said. “I keep telling everyone, if we’re going to spend most of our summer here, we might as well take our energy and use it here and make it look nice.”
Ever since the coronavirus pushed much of the country indoors, Penak isn’t the only one who has been spending more time working the soil.
Nationwide, people have been venturing into their backyards, spade in hand, to get outside and enjoy the fresh air. Gardening shops across the country have reported spikes in sales, with some even selling out of certain seed varieties.
Danny Summers, managing director of the Garden Center Group – a collective of more than 120 gardening center owners across North America – said the group’s members were seeing a bump in business by over 18% as of early May.
Not only that, but Summers heard from some shops that as many as a third of their customers were exploring gardening for the very first time.
Summers said the seed for this uptick in growth has been sprouting over the past few years, as an increasing number of younger people have taken to raising houseplants. The global pandemic, however, is also likely at play, he said.
“There’s something organic that happens when you go through a traumatic time like this that draws you back to nature,” he said.
Back in Washington County, Melanie Bedner said business at Bedner’s Farm and Greenhouse started slow this spring. She and her husband decided to open up the shop a few weeks later than usual to develop a plan for serving customers safely. The chilly weather also didn’t help sales.
Ever since the weather broke after Mother’s Day, Bedner said things are starting to pick back up. They’re still limiting the number of shoppers allowed inside at once to around 100, and sometimes customers line up at the door.
“There’s a lot of research out there that shows that gardening is good for people’s mental and physical health,” she said. “Nurturing something and taking care of it, watching it grow is definitely satisfying to people.”
Indeed, heaps of studies have documented the countless benefits that come along with gardening. Besides being a way to get moving, research has shown that being out in nature can reduce stress and anxiety, decrease depression, and lead to greater happiness and satisfaction with life.
And, as Penak has discovered, nature offers plenty of educational opportunities, as well. After digging out a bird feeder from her garage and watching species she had never seen before flutter to her lawn, Penak made bird feeders for her students and delivered them to their houses. She’s had them working on a bird-watching project lately – something she hoped would get them out of the house and away from their computer screens.
So far, she says she’s heard a whole lot of positive feedback from her students. One recently called her, thrilled that she now knows what the call of a mourning dove sounds like.
“And she said, ‘Oh my gosh, I just saw a woodpecker, I had to call and tell you, you were going to be so excited there’s a woodpecker in my backyard,'” Penak recalled.
Penak’s sister has also been devoting her time in quarantine to transforming her backyard across the county in Cecil.
With three soccer players in the house, Melissa Bellino and her family have been working to turn what used to be the rubber mulch foundation for a playground into a patch of turf.
It’s been a lot of work, but everyone already has big plans for the little field: Bellino’s daughter wants to set up a volleyball net, and her husband has been talking about laying down a tarp in the wintertime to make an ice skating rink.
Bellino is a teacher, too – math at Canon-McMillan High School – and she’s also been struggling to adjust to spending more time in front of a computer.
“I kept joking with my husband that one of the only reasons I wanted to do this project was because I don’t sit during the day,” she said. “I’m up, I’m moving around, I’m teaching, I don’t sit at my desk, and I’ve been going crazy because I have to sit all day long.”
On top of the turf project, Bellino and her family have also been working on a raised garden bed.
They built it themselves over a few nights, and Bellino and her daughter painted quotes on its panels: “There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path,” reads one, and “Happiness blooms from within,” another.
Laura Delach is no stranger to the advantages of working the earth; she’s been gardening for 50 years.
It’s an excellent activity to do with kids, she said, adding that if they grow it, they’ll usually try it. Her two-year-old grandson recently tasted a radish for the first time after helping her pick some from her garden – he didn’t enjoy it too much, she said, laughing.
As master gardener coordinator for PennState Extension’s Master Gardener Program, Delach has also seen the spike in interest for gardening over the pandemic up close and personal. Since April, the PennState program has been offering a series of free classes to the public, which Delach says 1,300 people have signed up for – tuning in from around the country and even Canada.
Moving forward, Summers said, the gardening community will have to connect with folks who are just picking up the activity for the first time, encouraging them to continue planting even after the pandemic is over.
“And really,” he said, “if they found kind of their peace and calmness – if they found a nurturing effect through this – it’s not going to go away. It’s going to be a friend they can rely on for many years.”