Faced with empty supermarket shelves, more time on our hands, confined at home with kids to educate and entertain it seems many thoughts have turned to seeds.

The unfolding COVID-19 crisis is seeing a huge surge in interest in growing our own food at home. Re-growing of veggies is going viral, and we’ve been hitting the virtual shops to get our hands on gardening supplies. Online seed companies and gardening outlets are seeing unprecedented sales and interest. Over Easter weekend, some online garden retailers saw a rise in sales of 500% over usual levels, and others have reported online footfall increase of 4000%. Many seed retailers are having to put in measures to deal with these extraordinary levels of demand and delivery times are longer than usual.

Seeds of rurbanisation

Whether this is panic planting for self-sufficiency, or a bid to sew some positivity into our daily lives and provide some recreation and wellbeing, we can’t be sure. Either way, this wave of activity in urban food growing is of huge interest to us here in the Rurban Revolution project. Our team and project are founded on the idea that using more of our urban space for growing fruit and vegetables and making farming more prominent in our daily lives is central to creating a better food future for all. We call this rurbanisation – the ruralisation of our urban environment and lives. There is lots of evidence to suggest that engaging in growing can help make us happier and help us produce meaningful amounts of fresh fruit and vegetables to support healthy diets. Green spaces in cities have also been shown to be important for environmental sustainability: contributing to biodiversity, water flow regulation, carbon storage and mitigating air pollution. Our interdisciplinary team is exploring how rurbanisation could help make us healthier by changing our diets, how it could make us more sustainable by transforming urban ecosystems and easing the pressures of agriculture, and make us more resilient to food shortages by localising supply chains.

Growing well?

Not all attempts at urban food growing harvest the same benefits, however. Getting growing can be a steep learning curve. Many of us are turning to Google for advice, with searches in the UK for ‘how to grow vegetables’ being 3.5 times higher than usual compared to previous years. The resources needed and access to outside space likely means that this is an unequal opportunity. Who is able to grow their own vegetables and who cannot, even if they would like to? Even more importantly, does what we grow end up on our plate? How good are we in growing those Amazon-bought seeds and keeping those young plants alive? With home schooling becoming essential, is this an opportunity for this to become part of our children’s education? Could this be the way we manage to ensure that the next generation is connected with the food they eat and appreciate its value? Are we growing on the kitchen windowsill or are vegetable patches displacing lawns or creating new vegetated surfaces in our urban environments? What do pollinators make of all this?

In this crisis, our thoughts at Rurban Revolution HQ turn to these little seeds as they disperse across our society. We have lots of questions and there will be much to learn for a post-COVID-19 world. If you have answers or ideas then please do get in touch with us.