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.”