How the pandemic and gardening startups fed our home-grown cravings

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Hydroponics can work at a large or small scale.


Bridget Carey / CNET

This story is part of Road Trip 2021, CNET’s coverage of the Biden administration’s push to grow American manufacturing and make more things in the USA.

My plant obsession began early last year when I broke my leg just one week before the US descended into COVID-19 lockdown. Stuck at home with a 4-year-old whose Seattle preschool had closed, I bought a lemon tree that we could tend together — something to keep us occupied and out in the sunshine. By the time we heard of one of the first American COVID-19 deaths, in the hospital where my son was born, our garden grew with a crop of Yukon gold potatoes in a planter box. 

By summer, just before another leg surgery, I’d peppered the yard with tomato plants, knockout roses and a 100-foot lilac hedge. And today after 17 months at home, my garden has grown to include basil, rosemary, chives, lavender, mint, oregano, hens and chicks, blueberry and butterfly bushes, hydrangeas, gardenias and five apple trees. “You have a problem,” my husband Dave muttered the other day as he lugged the garden hose across the yard under the August sun. 

But my problem was born out of necessity. When the pandemic hit, most of us watched as supply chain shortages — including

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