Homegrown vegetables can save you money — and taste better.

SHNS / Joe L’ampl

More families are looking right under their feet to ease the problem of high food prices.

As consumers balk at the rising cost of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They’re building raised vegetable beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect pests.

At Al’s Garden Center, in Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43 percent from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17 percent. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16 percent. It’s much the same story at Williams Nursery, in Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6 percent even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16 percent. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers down slightly, while sales of vegetables have risen 20 percent over last year.

The grow-your-own trend comes as the price of food has skyrocketed. The government recently reported that April’s 0.9 percent increase in food prices from the previous month was the fastest pace in 18 years — a reflection of global pressures, from drought in Australia to increased demand in India and China.

For Michele von Turkovich, in South Burlington, Vt., those pressures hit home when she noticed her average grocery bill hit $800 a month. “I reached for the organic strawberries the other day and realized, I can’t buy organic,” says the research-lab technician and mother of three teenage daughters.

After chatting with a neighbor who has a large garden, von Turkovich decided to dig up a 10-by-12-foot patch of lawn on the side of her house to plant vegetables. Her neighbor helped her decide how to make the best use of the space so that there would always be something in the garden to harvest.

So far, the lettuce is growing well, and she’s harvesting radishes. Also sprouting are about a dozen varieties of greens, including Swiss chard, kale, scallions and endive. A used soccer net serves as a makeshift trellis for the peas she is expecting.

It’s a lot of toil, though. Von Turkovich says she typically spends at least an hour after work each day on her garden and about half the weekend. “It takes a significant amount of my spare time.”

Even before this year’s food-price crunch, the vigor for veggies was already gaining momentum. An annual survey of more than 2,000 households by the National Gardening Association shows that the average amount spent per household on flowers was flat in 2007 compared with a year earlier. But spending on vegetable plants rose 21 percent, to $58 per household last year, and spending on herbs gained 45 percent, to $32.

Bruce Butterfield, the association’s research director, expects this year to be another strong one for vegetable gardening, due to “the combination of gas prices, food prices, and people staying at home because the world’s gone crazy,” he says. “At least they can have some control over their backyard.”

George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co., in Warminster, Pa., says he thinks the veggie-gardening rage is prompted by more than just food costs. His business has seen more baby boomers “entering their prime gardening years,” he says. Now, this generation has “a lot of time, the rat race is over, a home that is likely to be their last, and kids past puberty,” he says.

Burpee’s sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40 percent this year, twice last year’s growth rate. Tomatoes, summer squash, onions, cucumbers, peas and beans continue to be top sellers. “We’re running out of things like onions, that you think would never be that hot and raging,” he says.

In West Columbia, S.C., Sarah Rosenbaum ripped up about a quarter of her family’s landscaped yard to install six raised vegetable beds. “You get a pack of seeds for a dollar or two, and you have got a whole bed of organic vegetables for a fraction of what you’d pay at the store. And they taste better.”

The project got under way in early March when Rosenbaum, her partner and his 12-year-old twins started seeds indoors for all their vegetables — from bok choy to zucchini. “We’re out in the garden after work every day, pretty much,” she says. “We love doing the work, so it doesn’t really feel like work.” She hopes the experience will also inspire the twins to eat more vegetables.

To be sure, a new gardener can find himself plunking down a significant amount of money to get started. Rosenbaum says that the initial investment in her vegetable garden was around $500 for everything from lumber to wire cages. While that may seem high for someone trying to save on food costs, she plans on reusing the materials year after year. “We’re even planning to save seeds for next year,” she says.

In the Garden Grove neighborhood of Portland, Ore., a community garden got a big makeover. Not only did the 15 participating households decide to double the garden’s size and install a rain-sensitive sprinkler system, but they also set aside a section so that each family could have its own subplot.

“I’m in no way a tie-dye-wearing granola hippie,” says Garden Grove resident Dylan T. Boyd, a vice president at an e-mail marketing company and the father of two small boys. “But I was looking at the price of blueberries the other day — $5 for a fistful. I thought, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”

While it’s a time commitment, he says, the payback is far greater. “It’s so much easier to walk to the top of the street and grab your lettuce and tomatoes for dinner, fresh every day.”Growing your own

Talk to your local nursery or check seed packets for instructions on ideal planting times, which vary depending on what part of the country you live in. Because it’s a little late in the season, seedlings may be a good way to get started, and small numbers of plants won’t overwhelm a beginning gardener. Here are some other things to consider:

•Soil Testing

If you live near an industrial plant or even in an old house where lead-based paint may have seeped into the soil, you should consider getting the soil checked for contaminants.

For information about soil testing, contact the University of Rhode Island’s cooperative extension’s garden hotline at (800) 448-1011 to talk with a master gardener Monday-Thursday 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., or visit uri.edu/ce. For the University of Massachusetts extension, visit www.umassextension.org. UMass doesn’t have a hotline, but the Web site has fact sheets and contact information.

The URI Master Gardeners offer free soil testing events during the summer, but they only test for soil pH. There’s a small fee for a full test. Other information and fact sheets are available at urimga.org.

If you build a separate or raised bed and fill it with compost and topsoil, you can forgo soil testing.

You can also buy a soil-testing kit at a garden center that will tell you the pH and key nutrient levels. Optimum pH for growing vegetables is generally slightly acidic (between 6.5 and 7). If you don’t have enough nitrogen, phosphorous or potassium in your soil, add organic matter, such as a good compost. Also consider organic fertilizers to boost those nutrients, such as blood meal, alfalfa meal, sea kelp or fish emulsion.

•Best Conditions

Most vegetables do best when they get plenty of sun, so pick a spot that gets optimum sunlight, at least six to eight hours of direct sun daily. Leafy greens, such as lettuce and spinach, can tolerate shadier conditions. Also, leafy vegetables typically do best if planted in the cooler part of the season, before average temperatures go much past 70 degrees. Vegetables that do best in the hotter months include tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and squash. To conserve space, consider planting lettuce underneath tomato vines or even mixing them in other parts of the garden, among the foliage, vines and flowers.

“Sometimes people think they have to be in perfect rows, but there’s no reason you can’t put them in a little closer and mix them in with flower gardens,” says Lori Bushway, a gardening outreach specialist at Cornell University. She adds that doing so is also a good foil for pests, which tend to zero in more rapidly on plants that are massed together. When distributed around the landscape, “they’re harder to find,” she says.

•Think Before You Spray

If you see a pest, find out what it is before reaching for that scary-sounding spray. “People are buying sprays without even knowing what the problem is in the first place,” says John Traunfeld, director of the home and garden information center at the University of Maryland’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The local cooperative extension can help identify the problem and suggest the best remedy. “A lot can be taken care of by just hand picking,” he says.