Trend Analysis of Balcony Vegetable Gardens in Korea, Before and After COVID-19 Pandemic Using Big Data

Background and objective: Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people have been staying at home more and "balcony vegetable gardens," a form of urban agriculture, have been mentioned more frequently. As a result of the Korea Housing Survey in 2020, the percentage of households living in apartments among general households in Korea was 51.1%, but there is insufficient research to understand public perception and trends of the balcony vegetable gardens. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the trends of balcony vegetable gardens over the last 4 years including before and after the COVID-19 outbreak and to provide basic data for effective application to related policies and research. Methods: A total of 5,011 posts that mentioned balcony vegetable gardens were collected from Naver blogs and cafes from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2021. To tokenize nouns, Okt morphological analysis of KoNLPy was used, and keywords were derived using TfidfVectorizer of Scikit-learn library. Following that, LDA topic modeling was performed by setting the hyper parameters as α= 0.1, β = 0.01 and iterations = 1,000. The above analysis was conducted using Python 3.9.5. Results: Before the outbreak of COVID-19, balcony vegetable gardening began to receive attention and vitalized as a form of participation in urban agriculture, but after the outbreak, they are established as an activity for healing, emotional support, environmental campaign, and healthy hobby. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, people clearly seemed to seek a more sustainable lifestyle through balcony vegetable garden activities. This shows the values and expected outcomes the public has toward urban agriculture. Conclusion: Balcony gardening activities heal the public, and this healing effect could be a key to the revitalization and development of urban agriculture. These findings can help establish policies and set the directions for urban agriculture that reflect the values and expected outcomes the public has toward urban agricultural activities. © 2022 by the Society for People, Plants, and Environment.

Evaluation of Compact Tomato Cultivars for Container Gardening Indoors and under Sunlight

Numerous compact tomato cultivars are available for home gardening. However, evaluations under different environmental conditions are limited. The aim of this study was to characterize the growth and productivity of 20 compact tomato cultivars grown indoors under environmental conditions that resembled a residential space (11 mol·m−2·d−1 of white light, constant 22 °C, and moderate relative humidity) or in a greenhouse with sunlight only. Plants in the greenhouse were generally larger and yielded more fruit than those grown indoors, likely due to the various differences in environmental conditions and corresponding effects of water and nutrient availability. Considering growth and yield variables, all cultivars evaluated in this study are recommended for outdoor gardening. However, ‘Little Bing’, ‘Sweet SturdyTM F1—Grace’, ‘Sweet SturdyTM F1—Jimmy’, ‘Sweet SturdyTM F1—Jo’, and ‘Tarzan F1′ are likely too large to be grown in most space-limited indoor environments. Furthermore, ‘Little Bing’, ‘Rosy Finch’, ‘Sweet ‘n’ Neat Yellow’, and ‘Yellow Canary’ were affected by intumescence when grown indoors, which could negatively affect gardening experiences until recommendations to mitigate this disorder become available. Results from this study provide baseline information for the use of compact tomato cultivars for container gardening indoors and under sunlight.

Converting Home Spaces into Food Gardens at the Time of Covid-19 Quarantine: all the Benefits of Plants in this Difficult and Unprecedented Period.

People are facing uncertain and difficult times in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. The benefits of plants (psychological, health, economic, productive) in this period of forced isolation can be of key importance. If many of us have to self-isolate in urban or suburban environments, we need something to do to keep our bodies and minds active and fed. In such a challenging scenario, a vegetable garden in home spaces can bring recreational, health, economic and environmental benefits. Regardless of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is untapped potential for this kind of garden to impact environmental outcomes, public awareness, and market trends. Home vegetable gardens could provide a small-scale approach to the sustainable use of natural resources, leading towards self-sufficiency, self-regulation, sustainability, and environmental protection.