By Nate Jones

Staff Writer

Scarborough native Roger Doiron is getting the word out on home
gardening, a hobby that can make “going organic” easier and less
expensive than shopping at specialized stores.

With an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master’s degree in
international relations, Doiron said he was a “self taught gardener.”

“It’s a passion that is becoming a bit of a profession,” said Doiron, who has been gardening at home for the past 15 years.

Doiron helped to create the non-profit organization Kitchen Gardeners
International (KGI) in 2003. The group focuses on promoting healthy
eating specifically through home gardening and has grown by 30 percent
since its beginnings as a small Web site.

“It has taken off, our network now includes 4,900 people from 90
countries. There’s the beginnings of a home-gardening renaissance
here,” Doiron said.

Doiron said he first realized how important home grown food can be
during his time outside the United States while he lived in Brussels,
Belgium.

“A three month trip turned into 10 years,” Doiron said.

Doiron met his wife in Belgium, and quickly learned a lot about
“actively eating.” Doiron said he has fond memories of his
mother-in-law spending “a good amount of time” preparing the meals for
he and his wife. While in Belgium, Doiron worked for a non-profit
environmentalist group, “Friends of the Earth,” where he said he
learned about gardening’s importance for personal health and
environmental reasons.

According to “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, a book Doiron said
he has found inspirational, Americans spend less than 10 percent of
their income on food, less than one half hour preparing a meal, and a
little more than an hour enjoying it.

“Americans would do well to copy the French and Italians; people who make an effort to buy better quality foods,” he said.

 Doiron said he also lives by Pollan’s belief that “food” consists of things a great-grandmother would recognize as “food.”

“That means yogurt is in, but Go-gurt is out,” Doiron said.

Pollan’s book also encourages readers to stay away from any kind of food that cannot rot.

“If it is meant to last forever it may not be the best thing to eat,” Doiron said.

Doiron and his wife moved back to the U.S. with their three boys in
2001. After teaching French for two years in South Hamilton, Mass.,
Doiron settled back in Scarborough.

“It took me 40 years to travel 100 yards,” the 41-year-old Doiron said,
as he now lives next to his parents and the house he grew up in.

Doiron said he believes Americans have physically distanced themselves
from what they eat, as most food travels 1,500 miles “from field to
fork.” This distanced relationship has resulted in Americans having
very little knowledge about what they eat, Doiron said.

“I believe people can find a little wiggle room in their day for cooking and gardening,” Doiron said.

In addition to serving as the founding director of KGI, Doiron recently
was selected to serve a two-year term as a fellow with the Food and
Society Fellowship, an international group focused on addressing the
many barriers facing home gardeners.

Doiron said he is excited to be talking with people about small-space
options for gardening, as may be needed in an apartment or a home
without a yard.

“I’m not going to fool people that it’s easy, but it’s good work. If
you can carve out the time for it, the benefits are enormous. There’s
no down side,” Doiron said.

Doiron said most first time home gardeners are so enthusiastic about beginning, they may take on too much.

“Start small, and with things that you like. Do your homework on the
plants you want to grow,” Doiron said, as many plants require different
amounts of space and growing timetables. “It’s a little soil science,
but not rocket science.”

Doiron’s own garden includes “typical” vegetables such as tomatoes,
peas, potatoes and herbs, but Doiron said his squashes are the real
challenge. He said he has a list of things he would like to grow, and
adds to it every year. Undeterred by Maine’s northern location, Doiron
said he enjoys growing artichokes after he visited a coastal Maine farm
with entire fields of the vegetable.

Doiron said economic recession might be responsible for some of the attention that home gardening is receiving.

Many people are surprised to learn that his family eats from their own
garden for much of the year, as they can keep many of the vegetables
fresh in a chest freezer that Doiron said he purchased with his greens
in mind.

“There are savings to be made,” Doiron said, comparing the cost of
supermarket produce to the price of a single seed packet. “The benefits
quickly outweigh the costs.”

Even a small salad garden can provide vegetables year round, Doiron said.

Often in urban areas a soil test to avoid food contamination is a good
idea, which can result in other minor startup costs. Scarborough
residents are lucky in that most of the town was once farmland and
would most likely not need anything added to produce a healthy garden,
Doiron said.

Home gardeners don’t need a whole lot of “garden gadgetry” either,
Dorion, who borrows his neighbor’s roto-tiller, said. Neighborhoods
should garden as a community rather than in competition with each
other.

“It’s more time consumption rather than out-of-pocket costs that keep
people from starting a garden,” Doiron said. “There are people who
don’t have a green thumb, but anybody can garden as long as they’re
willing to learn as they go.”

The Scarborough Public Library hosted the first of the four
“Cultivating Community” conferences focusing on “taking stock of where
we are and where we’ve been as a food producing community,” Doiron said.

Four different generations of dairy farmers attended the first
conference, which Doiron said was helpful in looking at Scarborough’s
agriculture past.

The second session “Protecting Our Food Resource Base at Land and Sea,”
is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 28 at the library. Part
three, “Growing Healthy Children, Schools and Neighborhoods: Connecting
the dots between food, health, community and the environment,” is
slated for 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27. And the final part of the
series, “Living La Vida Local: Practical steps and ideas for getting
Scarborough Fare,” is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 10.

“A lot of the culture is still there, although the industry isn’t what
it used to be,” Doiron said of several Pine Point residents who
stressed the importance clamming had on the area in the past.

Doiron said the next three conferences will begin to address more
specific local issues, including Scarborough’s lack of a farmer’s
market or a community garden.

“There are a lot of good people here that want to do good things for
the community,” Doiron said. “And people are the ultimate natural
resource.”