Courtesy Photo Gardeners are prepping for this planting season with more vegetables to provide food for their families and communities. Above, 6-year-old Helana Burns pokes a finger into the dirt at her family’s Zdrowy Farms in Posen.

ALPENA — More people are planting gardens and gardeners are planting more this year, in response to concerns about the coronavirus causing a food shortage. Experts have not confirmed there will be a shortage, but gardeners are still beefing up their vegetable planting in preparation.

Ray Burns owns and operates Zdrowy Farms in Posen. Preparing for a food shortage is smart in the current climate as the coronavirus and business shutdowns to prevent the spread of the virus continue to create uncertainty about the nation’s food supply, he said.

“We’re ramping it up this year,” Burns said. “The world can change. The world has changed a lot in a week, and it’s going to continue to change.”

According to the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, farming peaked in 1935, with 6.8 million farms. That number has shrunk to just over 2 million as of 2017, the USDA website reports.

During World War II, the U.S. provided food to much of the world, Burns said.

“We literally won that war because we fed troops all the way around the world from what we could harvest,” Burns, 50, said. “I look at that also as a nourishment and food quality thing.”

He said growing your own food is more nutritious and more economical.

“Famine is a real issue in the world,” he said. “And the policies we use to run this system do not favor food security. They favor corporate profits … It’s a health and security issue.”

Being prepared is the best way to secure a brighter future, said Burns, a former Eagle Scout.

“My effort is to get everyone who can produce producing,” Burns said. “It is the only way we’re going to come through this with a level head.”

He and his family have enjoyed gardening together for eight years. Especially during these times of isolation at home, he said, gardening provides a great bonding experience for him, his wife, Loretta, and their two children, Matthew, 9, and Helana, 6.

“We’ve found a great bit of relaxation and joy” from gardening, he said. “Although it is physical effort, and it is work, it’s been great … It’s a great way for my kids to understand that food is important.”

Burns has been doing nutritional consulting for 20 years, and is working toward his chiropractic degree.

“I see the importance of nutrition in the cycle of keeping someone holistically healthy,” he said.

He encourages others to plant a garden, raise some chickens, and “do what you can to sustain yourself, like two generations ago did, and survive the crisis.

“The only way I think we’re going to get through this, as a country, is put food in the ground, and have dinner table conversations, and go back to talking to your neighbors even if it has to be six feet away,” Burns said. “We are at risk … What matters right now is getting nutrients into people, because, without it, we’ll lose.”

Right now, we import 51% of our food in the U.S., he said, and that needs to change.

“Reconnecting with our neighbors in our own local economy is really — and basing it on local food — I think it’s going to be one of the most precious commodities available,” Burns said. “Even if the world straightens out in a month.”

Rose Bisanz owns and operates The Rose Garden of Greens in Ossineke.

“My farm is the CSA-style, which is community-supported agriculture,” Bisanz said. “I have members who buy shares of the harvest early on in the season, like in the spring and such, and then, come summer and fall, I deliver the harvest to them, so boxes of veggies every week throughout the season, to them. So the community supports the farmer, and, in turn, I support them. It’s a more one-on-one relationship than, say, a farmer’s market.”

She grows about 40 different types of vegetables.

“I grow whatever I can grow in northern Michigan,” she said.

She acknowledged a surge in growing and farming interest.

“There’s a worry about it,” Bisanz said of a possible food shortage during these unprecedented times. “I definitely am seeing a lot of it now. I was actually just telling someone the other day I can’t get the chicken varieties that I want right now because people are buying chickens all of a sudden. It’s one of the easiest and first steps into being self-sufficient, as far as, with eggs and such, people buy up chickens. That and gardening.”

Billie Thompson and her husband, Bill, own White Barn Gardens on M-72 in Harrisville. She’s doing the same amount of planting this year, but she said many people she has talked to are planning to either plant more or return to planting this year.

“I’ve heard from some people that are thinking about putting a garden back in” in response to the threat of a possible food shortage, Thompson said. “They’re thinking I can harvest my own stuff and put it in the freezer or can it.”

She plants peas and onions early in the season because they are cold crops, and adds more as temperatures warm up into the summer.

Anyone can start a garden, she said, and she encourages them to “start out small, and plant what you like.”

“You can put a lot of stuff in an eight-by-eight-foot garden, if you plant it correctly,” Thompson said.

Mary Centala owns and operates Heritage Acres greenhouse, nine miles out of Alpena at 7010 Leeck Road, north of Hubbard Lake Road.

“As 2020 was going, I thought, ‘I better plant more plants, because who knows what’s going to happen,'” Centala said.

The certified master gardener planted more tomatoes this year, including her late uncle Claude Robarge’s “Campbell’s” tomatoes, which are grown in a special manner to make them hearty and able to withstand colder temperatures.

Darby Hinkley is Lifestyles editor. She can be reached at 989-358-5691 or dhinkley@thealpenanews.com.